31 January 21
Final Day — We Surely Need a Good One
This is the last day of the month and we are not even close to where we need to be. But we have made up a lot of ground in the past few days and we do have a chance to keep it close.
Stop for just a moment and throw something in the hat.
In peace and solidarity.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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30 January 21
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Charles Pierce | Kevin McCarthy Made a Pilgrimage to the Holy Shrine of the Golden Commode
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "It's a damn miracle, is what it is. Barely three weeks ago, El Caudillo Del Mar-a-Lago was the most successful insurrectionist leader since Robert E. Lee. The Republicans were huddled in the bowels of the Capitol right along with the Democrats while a gibbet rose on the National Mall."
Barely three weeks have passed, and the seditious criminal who nearly got his (Republican) vice president strung up is entertaining gentleman callers in his shabby palace by the sea.
This was universally determined to be a fairly bad day in the world's oldest continuous self-governing republic.
Barely...three...weeks...ago.
From Politico:
The RNC is also expected to invite other potential 2024 candidates and Republican leaders to the retreat, which is to be held in Palm Beach, Fla., April 9-11...With Trump considering a 2024 comeback, the committee has been careful to demonstrate neutrality, since the former president is no longer an incumbent. It invited Trump and other would-be presidential candidates to its annual winter meeting earlier this month. Trump did not end up making an in-person appearance at the event, which occurred the same week as the Capitol riot. It has not been decided where in Palm Beach the April donor retreat will take place. But people familiar with the planning say it will not be at Mar-a-Lago.
Well, you have to draw a line somewhere.
This story popped in the wake of House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy's pilgrimage to the holy shrine of the golden commode in Florida. This story popped as McCarthy and the Republicans in Congress were busy trying to find a new way to do nothing about Marjorie Taylor Greene and the many voices in her head. (Space lasers owned by the Rothschilds set off the California wildfires? Robot roll call!) Mitch McConnell is Mitch McConnelling again, this time as a minority leader. I can't help but think of the decades in which George McGovern was rendered a non-person in the Democratic Party—and his politics declared anathema—for being a decent prairie populist who lost to a crook. Barely three weeks have passed, and the seditious criminal who nearly got his (Republican) vice president strung up is entertaining gentleman callers in his shabby palace by the sea. And hardly anyone in my business (or theirs) finds this development remarkable in any way.
From CNN:
According to one source, Trump has repeatedly questioned his Republican allies about efforts to remove [Liz] Cheney from her leadership position and run a primary candidate against her. He has also been showing those allies a poll commissioned by his Save America PAC that purports to show that Cheney's impeachment vote has damaged her standing in Wyoming, even urging them to talk about the poll on television. Trump's push comes as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is working to shore up his relationship with the ex-president, including meeting with Trump at his Palm Beach resort Mar-a-Lago on Thursday. McCarthy and Trump discussed the midterm elections in 2022, according to a readout provided by Save America. The statement claimed Trump "has agreed to work with Leader McCarthy" on retaking the majority in the House for the GOP.
This is one of those days where I wonder if I'm crazy or they are. The FBI is still rounding up the people who occupied the Capitol for the purpose of overturning a presidential election. The trials are going to be in federal courts all over the country for years. More dreadful material is bound to come pouring out about the insurrection, and about the administration that welcomed it. And barely three weeks after the mob overwhelmed the Capitol, the Republican Party has decided that it can't win an an election without the mob, and without the president* who incited it. For all our political divisions, I thought we all still agreed that overthrowing the republic and submitting to the rule of Buffalo Head Guy and the Walmart Warlords would not be a satisfactory outcome. For all our political divisions, I thought that cop-killing was something that devalued your political relevance going forward. Clearly, this calls for further study.
Dr. Anthony Fauci. (photo: Getty Images)
Fauci, Other Biden COVID-19 Advisers Tout 'Really Encouraging' Vaccine News
Brian Naylor, NPR
Naylor writes: "Dr. Anthony Fauci said Friday he welcomes the positive news about an additional COVID-19 vaccine announced in the past 24 hours, calling the results 'really encouraging.'"
READ MORE
Proud Boys and other protesters gather in Washington, D.C. (photo: Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: 'Bomb-Making Manuals' Found in Home
of Proud Boy Who Stormed US Capitol
Proud Boys Charged With Conspiracy in Capitol Riot
Anya van Wagtendonk, Vox
Van Wagtendonk writes: "Two members of the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group, have been charged with conspiracy for their involvement in the violent storming of the US Capitol on January 6."
Prosecutors say the men conspired to “obstruct, influence, impede, and interfere with law enforcement” during the riot.
wo members of the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group, have been charged with conspiracy for their involvement in the violent storming of the US Capitol on January 6.
On Friday night, federal prosecutors announced the charges against Dominic Pezzola — 43, of Rochester, New York — and William Pepe — 31, of Beacon, New York — saying they “engaged in a conspiracy to obstruct, influence, impede, and interfere with law enforcement officers engaged in their official duties in protecting the U.S. Capitol and its grounds on Jan. 6, 2021.”
Pezzola and Pepe are not the first members of an organized far-right group to face conspiracy charges. Three members of the Oath Keepers, a right-wing militia group, have also been charged for their participation in the attempted insurrection.
The two Proud Boys had previously faced other, lesser charges; at least four other members of their group face lesser charges as well, including disrupting a congressional proceeding. More than 170 other people have also faced lesser charges, such as for unlawful entry and disorderly conduct, for their part in the bloody incident, which left five people dead and more than 140 police officers injured. And at least two police officers who were present during the siege have since died by suicide.
According to a Justice Department press release announcing the charges, Pezzola and Pepe allegedly seized protective equipment from police, including the short metal barricades erected around the grounds of the Capitol. Video from the day shows rioters ripping down that fencing, overwhelming Capitol police officers. Other video shows some police officers moving the barricades themselves.
Pezzola and Pepe are also accused of “the stealing and purloining of property belonging to Capitol Police,” and Pezzola is accused of stealing a riot shield from a Capitol officer as well as later using it to smash a window of the Capitol building; the release notes he is apparently depicted doing so in video and photos from the day.
Pepe was arrested on January 12, and Pezzola was arrested on January 15. According to the DOJ press release, both have also been charged with “civil disorder; unlawfully entering restricted buildings or grounds; and disorderly and disruptive conduct in restricted buildings or grounds.”
Additionally, Pezzola was charged with “obstruction of an official proceeding; additional counts of civil disorder and aiding and abetting civil disorder; robbery of personal property of the United States; assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers; destruction of government property; and engaging in physical violence in a restricted buildings or grounds.”
These charges stem from his alleged theft and misuse of the riot shield. Pezzola was also allegedly part of the mob of mainly white men who were led on a chase by Eugene Goodman, a Black Capitol Police officer, who sought to keep the insurrectionists away from lawmakers. The pursuit was captured on video, and led to praise and a position of honor at Biden’s inauguration for Goodman.
Two Montana brothers who also allegedly chased Goodman were charged Friday with nine counts, including destruction of property, related to their role in the siege.
According to the New York Times, Pezzola is a former US Marine, and Pepe worked for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Both were affiliated with the Proud Boys, which promotes “Western culture” as a front for racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic ideologies.
The group openly and enthusiastically backed former President Donald Trump throughout his term in office, and Trump declined to condemn them and other white supremacist organizations during a debate with now-President Joe Biden in October.
Instead, Trump encouraged the group to “stand back and stand by.” That phrase was taken up as encouragement, and almost immediately landed on official merchandise for the group.
In the weeks and months after Trump lost his reelection bid, Proud Boys have been a recurring presence at so-called “Stop the Steal” protests, which falsely claimed that the national election had been stolen by the Biden camp. Some of these protests turned violent, with multiple people stabbed in Washington, DC and one person shot in Washington state during rallies in early December that also featured Proud Boys assaulting counterprotesters and passersby, as well as desecrating Black churches.
According to the Times, Pezzola is being represented by attorney Michael Scibetta, who said Friday night that he has not been able to see his client or the federal charging papers.
Conspiracy is the most serious charge faced by insurrectionists so far
Less than a week after the insurrection, federal law enforcement officials promised that arrests would continue, and that initial charges — then limited to things like theft of public property and violent entry — were “only the beginning.”
Indicting members of hate groups on federal conspiracy charges — as opposed to the more easily-proven unlawful entry and disorderly conduct charges — represents a push by the DOJ to keep that promise, and to prove the insurrectionists collaborated in efforts to break the law.
Generally speaking, federal conspiracy charges can carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison, although this sentence can be compounded by other offenses.
Notably, two people do not need to know one another’s identity in order to have conspired together — so even participants in an online forum, on which real names are not exchanged, can be charged as co-conspirators. Moreover, the specific role each conspirator was meant to play does not need to be proven — only that a particular federal crime was planned, and then occurred.
One question in proving a conspiracy case is likely to be to what extent the January 6 riots were planned in advance.
According to the New York Times, federal investigators have found evidence in Pezzola’s home suggesting he had been studying homemade explosives. There is less public evidence against Pepe, and Pepe’s attorney, Susanne Brody, declined comment about the case against Pepe to the Times and CNN.
But there is evidence online to support the argument that there was advance planning for the action at the Capitol. As Rebecca Heilweil and Shirin Ghaffary of Recode have reported, online extremists began organizing for offline action almost immediately after the November 3 presidential election.
On both mainstream social media and the smaller platforms favored by far-right extremists, members of the mob planned their trips to Washington well in advance of the violence that eventually unfolded. And those same services hosted livestreams and videos of the insurrection; Pezzola, for example, filmed himself smoking a “victory” cigar from inside the Capitol.
It will ultimately be up to federal investigators and the judicial system to determine whether online chatter — or even in-person efforts the day of the riot — will translate to convictions on conspiracy charges. According to court documents reported by the Washington Post, Assistant US Attorney Erik Kenerson described Pezzola’s actions as showing “planning, determination, and coordination.”
So far, three other people have also been charged with federal conspiracy in connection with the Capitol riots. On Wednesday, the DOJ announced that charges had been brought against Jessica Marie Watkins and Donovan Ray Crowl, both of Champaign County, Ohio; and Thomas Caldwell of Clarke County, Virginia for “conspiracy, obstructing an official proceeding, destruction of government property, and unlawful entry on restricted building or grounds.”
All three are affiliated with Oath Keepers, an anti-government paramilitary organization founded shortly after the election of former President Barack Obama. According to the New York Times, at least 10 other people bearing insignias of that far-right group were spotted during the riots.
Warkins and Crowl are also members of an Ohio-based militia, according to the DOJ press release announcing the federal charges.
The three indicted Oath Keepers are alleged to have communicated with one another both before and during the attack on the Capitol. They face up to 20 years in prison.
Artist and activist Alvaro Enciso, middle, leads a small group into the desert northwest of Tucson in to place handmade crosses where migrants lost their lives and to leave water for migrants making their way north and west. (photo: Max Herman)
2020 Was Deadliest Year for Migrants Crossing Unlawfully Into US Via Arizona
Samuel Gilbert, Guardian UK
Gilbert writes: "When the remains of two undocumented migrants were found in the desert of south-western Arizona last July, one body lay next to an arrow drawn in the sand, pointing north, with the word 'HELP' written beneath."
Remains of 227 migrants found last year, said Humane Borders, while at least 7,000 have died along US-Mexico border since 1998
The men had perished while attempting to cross into the US from Mexico, according to border patrol. Out of a group of three, one survived and told the federal agents their human smuggler had left the other two behind in the remote wilderness area.
“These people are not just numbers,” said Tony Banegas, executive director of the Colibri Center for Human Rights, an organization in Tucson working to identify migrant remains and helps families find missing loved ones.
“These are human beings with families and aspirations. They went to great lengths to make the journey, [only] to become just a grave in the desert.”
Last year was the deadliest on record for migrants crossing unlawfully into the US via Arizona, with the remains of 227 migrants found on the border according to Humane Borders.
“This was the hottest summer ever, and we saw the most recorded deaths ever. It’s a reminder of how dangerous the border can be,” said Douglas Ruopp, chair of the non-profit, which maps migrant deaths and stashes emergency water supplies in the desert.
Since 1998, at least 7,000 migrants are believed to have died along the US-Mexico border, maybe many more, as record-keeping is patchy.
As the US walled more of the border off, a policy priority under Donald Trump, the risks to those still determined to make the journey only increased.
“That’s a longstanding tradition, these barriers and walls have pushed people into more remote and treacherous terrain,” said Jeremy Slack, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Texas-El Paso and the author of Deported to Death: How Drug Violence Is Changing Migration on the US–Mexico Border.
Crossing into any of the four US states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California along the 1,954-mile US-Mexico border can be dangerous – high barriers, isolated wilderness with extreme temperatures, swirling waters of the Rio Grande.
Norma Herrera is community organizer at the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network advocacy group in Texas, another deadly migrant corridor where at least an estimated 3,000 people have lost their lives since 1998.
“We need to be especially mindful of how various policies serve the same purpose … to deter migration by making it more deadly,” she said.
Further west, the Arizona desert can be especially deadly.
Trump’s aspiration to build a wall coast-to-coast at Mexico’s expense actually resulted in just 225 miles of fresh barrier, overwhelmingly at US taxpayers’ expense and mostly replacing dilapidated or minimal fencing.
But the surge in border deaths in Arizona last year – up from 144 in 2019 and 128 in 2018 – coincided with a flurry of construction there.
And the impact of the border wall on migrant deaths was compounded by Trump’s near-total block, only tightened in the pandemic, on those entering the US to seek asylum.
“In just about every way the Trump administration fundamentally ended access to asylum at the border,” said ACLU attorney Shaw Drake, thus exposing those who tried to cross anyway “to a litany of additional dangers”.
Benegas described visits to Mexico where asylum seekers languished in dangerous cities awaiting the interminable asylum process, under Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, denying “a universal right”.
“People are living under bridges, waiting for months. Some decide to take the risk and cross the desert,” he said.
In March 2020, Trump signed an emergency order last March allowing the summary expulsion of migrants at the border based on Covid-19 concerns, removing more than 380,000 people this way to date, according to federal data.
“They co-opted the pandemic to achieve their long-held goal of ending asylum at the border,” said Drake.
The Arizona border region features spiked cacti, thorny bushes and clinging grasses, often holding ripped fragments of migrants’ clothing.
“The flora along the border is known as thorn scrub, and for good reason,” said Emily Burns, program director of the Arizona-based Sky Island Alliance conservation group. “We can’t wear soft clothes in the field, they’d get shredded,” she said.
Many migrants are unprepared for the alien landscape and find themselves on a scorching trek.
“Often, people don’t have real shoes. Some are wearing sandals, they’re told it’s just going to be a short trip. Most people that I encounter in the desert have these terrible blisters on their feet. I don’t know how they’re walking,’ said Ruopp.
Many don’t, or cannot, carry enough water for a journey that can last days.
“Most leave with two-gallon bottles strapped around their neck,” said Ruopp. ‘That’s good for maybe a day. We find people that have been out for five or more.”
Last year was not only the hottest on record, the summer monsoon rains didn’t materialize.
Ruopp has encountered many lost and “delirious”, even “walking in a circle” or unknowingly “heading south back toward Mexico”.
Dehydration “really affects your decision making” and is a terrible way to die, he said.
Many hope things will change comprehensively under Joe Biden.
Since being sworn in, Biden suspended deportations, although a judge last week overturned that moratorium. And the government officially rescinded Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that led to families being separated and detained at the border, with more rollbacks to follow.
But while the president issued a stop-work order for border wall construction, it’s not certain whether barriers will be removed.
The Arizona Democratic congressman Raúl Grijalva wants the Biden-Harris administration to put humanity at the center of immigration policy.
“I urge them to reverse all of Trump’s xenophobic policies that created chaos,” he told the Guardian.
Grijalva concluded: “It’s no secret that the Trump administration’s draconian policies at the border created a humanitarian crisis that pushed vulnerable asylum seekers to increasingly desperate and dangerous routes to seek safety … and cost countless lives.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. (photo: AP
After Trump, Democrats Set Out on a Mission to 'Repair the Courts'
Sahil Kapur, NBC News
Kapur writes: "President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats are vetting civil rights lawyers and public defenders to nominate as judges, embarking on a mission to shape the courts after Republicans overhauled them in the last four years, according to senior party officials and activists."
The White House and senators are coordinating on an ambitious judicial project. Some Democrats want to fill every vacancy by the end of 2022.
Democrats have a wafer-thin Senate majority that gives them control over appointments. They believe they have two years to make their mark and fill a growing number of vacancies before a midterm election where the party in power historically loses seats.
Some are preparing for a Supreme Court retirement as early as this summer, with most of the speculation centered on 82-year-old Justice Stephen Breyer, a Democratic appointee.
In addition to forming a new commission to study structural changes to the judiciary, the Biden White House has asked senators to recruit civil rights attorneys and defense lawyers for judgeships. Officials who work on the issue say they’ve seen an outpouring of interest and have begun holding sessions to offer information and advice on navigating the confirmation gauntlet.
“We’ll see the proof of this in President Biden’s first set of nominees. I expect they’re going to look very different than the kind of judges that Democratic presidents have put forward in the past,” said Chris Kang, co-founder of the progressive group Demand Justice and former deputy counsel in the Obama White House. “Their backgrounds will be radically different, overall, and that will make a huge difference in our courts.”
For decades, Republicans have prioritized the courts in elections to stir up their base. Democrats have all but ignored the issue on the campaign trail and are now playing catch-up after their voters watched in horror as former President Donald Trump and Republicans filled up more than one-fourth of the U.S. judiciary with predominantly young conservatives.
Senate Democrats are considering the procedural tools to use to assure success — some are calling for eliminating the “blue slip” courtesy that gives senators a veto over judicial nominees who would serve in their states. Republicans ended it for circuit judges, and now Democrats are considering whether to extend that to district nominees.
Many Democrats remain furious about Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell's refusal to let them fill a Supreme Court vacancy months ahead of the 2016 election, an extraordinary move that he followed by confirming a conservative justice the week before the 2020 election.
“I call it repair the courts,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview. “We have to make sure that we are filling vacancies with credible, neutral, fair-minded judges, rather than the political operatives that we saw so many of in the Trump years.”
“The prospect that we won’t always have a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in the Senate should motivate us to move with real dispatch this time,” Whitehouse said, calling it “a very prudent goal” to fill every judicial vacancy by the end of 2022.
He urged Democratic colleagues to ignore “Republican procedural caterwauling” on matters like blue slips after the tactics they used to tilt the courts to the right.
One Democratic aide who works on nominations said the Senate's priority on judges will be to fill district court vacancies in blue states. The aide said Democrats will "wait and see" if Republicans deal with the fewer red-state vacancies in good faith before deciding whether to push ahead and fill them.
There are already about four-dozen vacancies on federal district courts and a handful on circuit courts. That number will undoubtedly grow when more judges retire and if Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland is confirmed, forcing him to vacate his D.C. Circuit seat.
“We have many vacancies we’d like to fill. We want to do it in an orderly, sensible way,” incoming Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told NBC News.
Even though the Senate is split 50-50, under the power sharing agreement leaders are likely to approve, if all the Democrats stick together, they can approve judges without any Republican support.
With Democrats focused on confirming Biden’s cabinet and advancing his Covid relief package, some people involved in the judicial process say they expect the first batch of judicial nominations to land in the spring.
White House counsel Dana Remus told senators in a recent letter to recommend candidates for district court vacancies within 45 days of a vacancy, so they can “expeditiously” be considered.
“With respect to U.S. District Court positions, we are particularly focused on nominating individuals whose legal experiences have been historically underrepresented on the federal bench, including those who are public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys, and those who represent Americans in every walk of life,” Remus wrote in the letter, which was obtained by NBC News.
That means fewer prosecutors and “big corporate lawyers,” who Whitehouse said tend to have a “high-speed lane” to the judiciary. He said plaintiff’s lawyers will get pushback from groups like the Chamber of Commerce, but praised Biden for seeking “professional diversity” along with demographic diversity.
The Remus letter "really did light a fire" under the Senate, the Democratic aide said, adding that regular conversations are occurring between senators and the White House.
Republicans, aided by a well-funded network of conservative groups, expect to fight the Democratic effort to shape the judiciary. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley is poised to become ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, serving as the party's first line of defense against Biden's nominees.
But the GOP will have to pick its battles.
“There's always deference to a president,” Grassley said in an interview, promising not to approach the issue “any different than I did in the past.”
The slim Democratic majority means that the most aggressive ideas that progressives had pushed for — including adding up to four seats to the Supreme Court — are probably going nowhere.
Biden has begun a commission he promised on the campaign trail that will review the structure of the courts and recommend changes. It will be co-chaired by Bob Bauer (who served as a top Biden lawyer during the election) and Cristina Rodriguez (a Yale Law professor and former Justice Department lawyer), according to an administration source familiar with Biden’s plans.
The commission will include a "wide range of expert views" and feature public testimony, said the administration source, who said recruitment of commissioners has "progressed significantly" but isn't finished. The source added that the focus will include lower courts — not just the Supreme Court.
A White House official said Biden “remains committed to an expert study of the role and debate over reform of the court and will have more to say in the coming weeks.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., hasn’t taken a position on Supreme Court expansion, saying he’ll wait to see what Biden’s commission proposes. But he has said lower courts should get new seats, arguing that some part of his state, like Buffalo, “don’t have enough” judges.
He told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in a Tuesday interview that Democrats “can fill up a lot” of seats.
“There will be lots of vacancies that come up. And I think there are a lot of judges — Democratic appointees who didn't take senior status while Trump was president who now will,” Schumer said. “Then we get to fill it.”
Cubans taking part in the annual May Day parade in Havana. (photo: AP)
How Cuba Survived and Surprised in a Post-Soviet World
Sara Kozameh, Jacobin
Kozameh writes: "After the fall of the USSR, most observers expected Cuba to follow in its wake. But the Cuban system has now lasted for 30 years since the Soviet collapse."
To explain its persistence, we need to drop Cold War stereotypes and look at the Cuban experience in its own right.
he fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the consequent demise of its multilateral economic assistance programs shook what had been the socialist world. By the time the USSR voted to formally dissolve, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) — the economic trading bloc that provided crucial economic assistance and preferential trade agreements to smaller Communist states — had already been dismantled.
This threw Cuba, COMECON’s only member in the Western hemisphere, into economic turmoil. Nearly overnight, the island nation found itself cut off from its primary trading partner. It lost more than four-fifths of both its import and export markets, which had supplied it with energy, food, and machinery, helping sustain the Cuban economy for over three decades, ever since the start of the US embargo in 1961.
GDP plunged by 35 percent over the space of three years. Cuban agricultural output fell by 47 percent, construction by 74 percent, and manufacturing capacity by a staggering 90 percent. The lack of fuel imports from abroad paralyzed Cuba’s industries. Lengthy blackouts and food queues became a feature of daily life.
With no gasoline to power their cars or buses, Cubans had to walk or cycle to their destinations. Lack of electricity meant there were no fans to stave off the sweltering tropical heat — and no way to power refrigerators, either. People’s intake of calories fell by about one-third, as hunger and malnutrition rose to levels not seen since before the 1959 Revolution.
After the Fall
Few in the Western world expected Cuba’s political and economic system to survive. History, we were told, had ended; capitalism reigned, while the socialist world was crumbling. It was only a matter of time before the Cuban exception ceased to be exceptional. Yet in Cuba, “history” has continued to plod on.
Thirty years after the fall of the USSR, the government that emerged from the Cuban Revolution still holds power. It has now existed in the post-Soviet world for longer than it spent under the wing of the Soviets. The distinctive Cuban model has endured, and its leaders still seek to balance the pressures of functioning amidst an overwhelmingly capitalist global system with the objective of advancing a non-capitalist economy that doesn’t follow the same logic.
In her book We Are Cuba: How A Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, Helen Yaffe sets out to explain how Cuba’s model of socialism has held out against such odds. The answer, Yaffe argues, can only be found by taking the Cuban Revolution on its own terms, instead of allowing the residual insularity of US Cold War battles to condition the debate.
Those who perceive the Cuban system exclusively as a repressive dictatorship are unable to come to terms with the real society that exists — and by some measures, even thrives — beneath the obfuscating layers of political rhetoric. Yaffe aims to provide an economic and policy-based analysis of Cuba’s last thirty years, evaluating the island’s progress and setbacks on the basis of its own objectives.
The Special Period
Yaffe’s book identifies several reasons for the persistence of the Cuban model. A willingness to adjust the parameters of centralized government control is one of them. Cubans remember the 1980s as a time of relative abundance and stability. Soviet goods filled store shelves, and workers who met or exceeded production quotas frequently received beach vacations — even international travel.
From 1981 to 1984, Cuba’s annual average growth was 7.3 percent — starkly at odds with the downwards trajectory in the rest of Latin America. The region as a whole experienced a 10 percent drop in GDP during those years. However, there were a number of challenges associated with managing economic productivity — the growth of excessive bureaucracy, and a focus on providing material incentives for workers that bloated the budget — which eventually led to stagnation.
In 1986, Fidel Castro opted not to follow in the liberalizing strides of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost program in the USSR. Instead, he sought to reform Cuba’s central planning system by recentralizing control over the economy. His government also launched several new platforms for citizen participation and opened the island up to tourism.
Yaffe argues that this renewed emphasis on state intervention against what the government saw as the inadequacies of the market put Cuba in a better position to withstand the Soviet collapse a few years later. Since the state had recentralized agricultural production, for example, it was able to get food to those who needed it most during the worst years of the crisis — roughly 1991 to 1995 — which became known as the “Special Period” (shorthand for what Castro called the “Special Period in Time of Peace”).
In explaining how Cuba made it through this crisis, Yaffe also stresses the importance of a “humanistic austerity” as the state’s budget dried up in the early 1990s. Cuban leaders made drastic cuts: state spending on defense, for example, fell by 86 percent, and the government eliminated fifteen ministries altogether. However, it maintained and even increased expenditure on health, welfare, and social services. Subsidies helped ensure that basic goods reached people and protected jobs.
Broken infrastructure or equipment might have gone unrepaired, but every school and hospital stayed open. The share of GDP accounted for by spending on welfare and health rose by 29 percent and 13 percent, respectively, from 1990 to 1994. The mid-1990s saw the graduation of 15,000 new medical professionals, bringing the doctor-to-patient ratio to one doctor for every 202 inhabitants.
Despite the economic collapse, Cuba’s child mortality rates actually dropped, and life expectancy inched up from 75 years in 1990 to 75.6 in 1999. Although an increase of six months may appear trivial, it would have been reasonable to expect a drop under the circumstances — something that did occur in ex-Communist European states like Russia, where life expectancy fell by 6 years between 1991 and 1994.
Cuba’s fiscal deficit soared as a result of this approach, but it averted the threat of famine. To make up for the lack of imports, Yaffe reports, local food production expanded, ushering in the organic urban farming systems for which Cuba is now widely known. After eight years of state control over agriculture — an attempt to curb price gouging in food supplies — the state allowed private farmers’ markets to reopen.
By choosing fiscal stimulus over austerity, Cuban economists helped shield the population from some of the most devastating effects of economic collapse. In 1995, economic growth resumed. Although it took ten years to get GDP back to pre-crisis levels, incremental improvements made it easier for people get by. By comparison, recovery from the 2008–9 crash in the US also took nearly a decade, while the recovery period for most ex-Soviet countries was even longer — about fifteen years.
Innovations
After making it out of this trough, the Cuban government launched a number of initiatives that were meant to stabilize the economy. The island’s lack of access to fossil-fuel energy had proved catastrophic in the 1990s; in the 2000s, it still experienced constant blackouts. In 2006, the government began pursuing alternative development strategies and making large-scale investments in renewable energy.
In a series of chapters, Yaffe describes the development of job training programs that turned unemployed young Cubans into social workers, an “Energy Revolution” that reduced wasteful practices and expanded the use of renewables, and ensured the country’s successful entrance into the biotechnology industry. Yaffe argues that such programs allowed Cuba to get back onto a path of economic growth, which in turn enabled it to improve the standard of living.
Cuba’s commitment to international solidarity has also paid off. Cuban medical internationalism is now the island’s principal export, bringing in $6.4 billion in 2018. This practice goes back a long way, well before it was a source of national income. In 1960, Cuba dispatched a disaster response brigade to Chile following a devastating earthquake. It then sent doctors to Algeria during that country’s independence struggle, and later to North Vietnam and central Africa. By the end of the 1960s, Cuban medics were working in twelve different countries.
Over the decades that followed, Cuba expanded its programs for overseas medical assistance, training tens of thousands of foreign students to become doctors at no charge. In many countries, Cuban doctors helped eliminate diseases like polio, malaria, and dengue, saving thousands of lives.
This has become a key plank of Cuban foreign policy, directly challenging established notions of the medical profession and the function of development aid in the leading capitalist states. While Cuba does now receive payment for its medical assistance, its commitment to providing free healthcare abroad still endures: nearly half of the sixty-two countries that housed Cuban medical brigades in 2017 paid nothing for their services.
Many Cubans remember the early 1990s not only as a time of long queues and unfilled stomachs, but also as one that produced new ideas and activities. As the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. But Yaffe argues that a commitment to socialist principles has also fostered such innovation, favoring models for sustainable development that prioritize human wellbeing.
Cuba’s state-led, centrally planned approach to medicine, for example, contrasts with the growth of profit-making healthcare services in the wealthiest capitalist countries — even those that had previously established public systems of provision. The small island’s current efforts to develop and complete clinical trials for a COVID-19 vaccine rival those of its vast northern neighbor.
The portrait of Cuban society presented in We Are Cuba will be unfamiliar to readers who rely on the mainstream press in the US. Yaffe believes that Cuba’s variety of socialism has survived in part because the island has a dynamic citizenry, many of whom are committed to socialist ideals and willing to participate in efforts to advance them.
There is, of course, a long-running and bitter debate about the nature of Cuba’s one-party state, and whether its existence means that the Cuban people have no say over their own lives. The author challenges those who consider the Cuban political system to be a priori illegitimate and undemocratic, insisting that its electoral process is in fact characterized by “grassroots representation and participation in decision-making.” According to Yaffe, public engagement in local administration through a number of state-led organizations strengthened bonds among Cuba’s citizens and renewed a sense of community that was critical to its post-Soviet survival.
After Fidel Castro stepped down in 2006, his brother Raúl took over as head of government and introduced structural reforms that were designed to address problems like dependence on food imports, low wages, and poor productivity. Instead of pushing through these measures in a unilateral manner, Yaffe argues, the government launched a series of forums and debates that sought to engage all sections of Cuban society, aiming to get a sense of what reforms were considered necessary or desirable, and what kind of changes would be broadly acceptable.
Yaffe describes a similar process that took place in 2011 when the Cuban Communist Party held its Sixth Congress. Several million Cubans took part in consultations that drew up a set of guidelines for updating the national economy, considering proposals to eliminate the ration book, reform pricing, and improve the quality of services like health, education, and transport.
The lengthy process of consultation and debate included 163,000 meetings held locally by residential, political, and workplace groups. It registered over three million opinions and organized them into 780,000 distinct recommendations. Before the Congress took place, 68 percent of the guidelines had been revised, while 45 proposals were rejected.
A national debate to write a new constitution began in 2013. Proposals for the constitution included reforms in the areas of private business and property ownership, age limits and term limits for government positions, and decentralization of administrative and political structures. In July 2018, the National Assembly of People’s Power released a draft of the constitution for two months of debate.
Yaffe describes Cuban citizens attending assemblies with annotated copies of the draft, demonstrating their level of engagement. A month in, three print editions had been sold out, with requests for additional copies arriving from the most remote mountainous regions. Social media became a space for critical views; some of the strongest criticism came from evangelical groups that opposed recognition of same-sex marriage.
In 2019, after substantial revisions to the draft, 87 percent of voters — 6.8 million people — voted to ratify the new constitution. While the final draft retained Cuba’s commitment against capitalism and the one-party state, it introduced reforms to the way it functions, such as presidential term limits and the right to legal representation upon arrest.
Meanwhile, the lack of independent trade unions and constraints on civil liberties are at least two areas of democratic deficiency identified by Cuba’s critics. The yardstick that Yaffe uses purposely leaves those types of critiques out of her assessment. And to be fair, there are many other elements of capitalist democracy that Cuba doesn’t have: hedge funds, corporate control over the economy, and endemic homelessness, for example.
If the Cuban system has endured, Yaffe shows, it is because enough people on the island have continued to engage and identify with it. And whether or not people agree with Yaffe’s largely positive evaluation of that system, it’s vital to acknowledge the context that has shaped it.
Since 1959, there have been credible threats of invasion from the US at several points, along with other forms of violence orchestrated by Washington and a debilitating economic blockade that has been in place for more than half a century. During the same time period, left-wing governments elsewhere in Latin America have repeatedly been ousted by force, from Chile in 1973 to Bolivia in 2019. If the US ceased to apply such overweening pressure and recognized the right of a vastly weaker nation to follow its own course, it would change the political calculus in Cuba.
While Yaffe’s book seeks to correct some important misconceptions about Cuba, it also raises a series of questions. How, for example, can we explain the large numbers of young Cubans who want to emigrate? It’s true that the US economic blockade is a major cause of Cuba’s deprivations (and as Yaffe points out, rates of defection among Cubans who work and travel abroad — doctors and sports players, for example — are actually quite low).
Yet if Cuban socialism has survived by combining innovative policies with popular participation and support, as the author suggests, then what accounts for the seeming abandonment of the revolutionary project by many young people — the very people who came of age during the period upon which the book focuses?
We Are Cuba tackles a wide range of subjects, but in many ways, it is a portrait of post-Soviet Cuba as seen from the vantage point of the Cuban state. Many of the sources and voices cited by Yaffe are Cuban diplomats, professionals, and government officials. The book offers less insight into how Cubans have experienced the last three decades of crisis, recovery, and reform on an everyday basis, or into the question of whether and to what extent their relations with the state have become more strained. It does, however, contain some important perspectives on Cuba’s trajectory from those who support the system.
Yaffe could have strengthened the message of her book by interrogating some of the categories it deploys. There are multiple references in the text to a rather amorphous group called “the revolutionary people of Cuba,” a label that comes across as passive and formulaic when the author clearly does not mean it to be either. Cuban society is not static or unchanging; like that of any other country, it is dynamic and complex. Its government has critics and supporters alike, and not all Cubans are “revolutionary.”
Treating everyone on the island as if they belonged to a single revolutionary monolith flattens out the real stories of hardship and endurance over the past thirty years. The Cuban government is now trying to figure out how to respond to the new demands of a vibrant civil society, whose members are not necessarily less committed or less socialist in their outlook.
Towards the end of 2020, for example, there were protests against the detention of the rapper Denis Solís by several hundred artists and intellectuals: some oppose the Cuban system outright, while others want that system to be reformed, retaining a commitment to socialism while ending what they view as arbitrary detention and censorship.
We Are Cuba fills an important gap for readers outside the country who mostly lack basic information about how its leaders have navigated a unique set of challenges since 1991, showing how government policies have developed over time in impressive detail. Yet many more challenges lay ahead.
The reinsertion of Cuba’s economy into the global capitalist market and subsequent liberalizing reforms have led to the return of the US dollar and with it, growing inequality. Yaffe describes the Cuban government as being concerned to balance a commitment to equity and social justice with the introduction of new market mechanisms, while not succumbing to capitalism altogether — no easy task when US sanctions, embargoes and political threats still keep the island very much under siege.
Cuba also has to deal with the COVID-19 crisis, the tightening in recent years of US sanctions that were already harsh, and the potential economic fallout from plans to unify the double currency, which may result in devaluation of the peso. Its government also plans to finally eliminate the ration book, which has guaranteed basic food supplies to all Cubans, regardless of income, since 1963.
Despite the limitations that have been imposed upon it from abroad, Cuba has still managed to forge its own path in a post-Soviet world to a greater extent than most people would have thought possible in the early 1990s. Yaffe’s book should prompt readers to wonder what it might achieve without the burden of US intransigence — if the island finally had the opportunity to prosper rather than simply survive.
A black-tip shark. (photo: SharkSider)
Empty Seas: Oceanic Shark Populations Dropped 71 Percent Since 1970
Associated Press
Excerpt: "When marine biologist Stuart Sandin talks about sharks, it sounds like he's describing Jedis of the ocean."
Scientists have known for decades that individual shark species are declining, but a new study drawing on 57 global datasets underscores just how dramatically populations have collapsed.
“They are terrific predators, fast swimmers and they have amazing senses — they can detect any disturbance in the ocean from great distance,” such as smells or tiny changes in water currents, he said.
Their ability to quickly sense anything outside the norm in their environment helps them find prey in the vastness of the open ocean. But it also makes them especially vulnerable in the face of increased international fishing pressure, as global fishing fleets have doubled since 1950.
“You drop a fishing line in the open ocean, and often it’s sharks that are there first — whether or not they’re the primary target,” said Sandin, who works at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Scientists have known for decades that individual shark species are declining, but a new study drawing on 57 global datasets underscores just how dramatically worldwide populations have collapsed in the past half century.
Globally, the abundance of oceanic sharks and rays dropped more than 70 percent between 1970 and 2018, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
And 24 of the 31 species of sharks and rays are threatened with extinction, while three species — oceanic whitetip sharks, scalloped hammerhead sharks and great hammerhead sharks — are considered critically endangered.
“The last 50 years have been pretty devastating for global shark populations,” said Nathan Pacoureau, a biologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada and a co-author of the study.
Sometimes sharks are intentionally caught by fishing fleets, but more often they are reeled in incidentally as “bycatch,” in the course of fishing for other species such as tuna and swordfish.
Sharks and rays are both fish with skeletons made of cartilage, not bone. In contrast to most other kinds of fish, they generally take several years to reach sexual maturity, and they produce fewer offspring.
“In terms of timing, they reproduce more like mammals – and that makes them especially vulnerable,” said Pacoureau. “Their populations cannot replenish as quickly as many other kinds of fish.”
The number of fishing vessels trolling the open ocean has risen steeply since the 1950s, as engine power expanded ships’ range. And while climate change and pollution also imperil shark survival, increased fishing pressure is the greatest threat for every oceanic shark species.
“When you remove top predators of the ocean, it impacts every part of the marine food web,” said Stuart Pimm, an ecologist at Duke University, who was not involved in the study. “Sharks are like the lions, tigers and bears of the ocean world, and they help keep the rest of the ecosystem in balance.”
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