By WAYNE DELUCA Only days after threatening “fire and fury” against North Korea, President Donald Trump said, “We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary.” Trump was improvising, with no back-up from the Pentagon, and seems to be inventing his militaristic bombast as he goes. But we cannot dismiss the…
By ANN MONTAGUE On June 20, 691 PepsiCo workers in Buenos Aires arrived at work to see a piece of paper on the door notifying them that the plant was being relocated and they were all out of a job. In Argentina it is illegal to just close a factory and lay off workers. Companies have…
By MICHAEL SCHREIBER — UPDATED, Aug. 2 — On July 30, Venezuela elected a new 545-member National Constituent Assembly, which takes on the task of rewriting the country’s 1999 constitution. The country faces a severe economic crisis, made worse by the economic sabotage of pro-capitalist oppositionists. Working-class neighborhoods are plagued by shortages of food, medicine,…
By ERNIE GOTTA For two months, 50,000 students on campuses across Puerto Rico participated in a strike against the U.S.-imposed Fiscal Control Board, which was proposing $500 million in cuts. Mikael Rosa, a member of the student movement at the University of Puerto Rico, shares his experiences. Ernie Gotta: What demands pushed students to go…
COME TO FORDHAM LAW SCHOOL IN NEW YORK CITY MARCH 25-26, 2017 Dear Friends of Cuba: We are inviting organizations and individuals to help organize an inclusive, broad conference in New York City March 25-26, 2017 focused on US-Cuban relations. The National Conference will be held at the Fordham Law School and will bring together…
By JEFF MACKLER Fidel Castro Ruz, Cuba’s revolutionary leader, president, and prime minister for five decades, died in Santiago de Cuba on Friday, Nov. 25. He was 90 years old. Although one of the most profound, clear-sighted, honest, and dedicated revolutionary leaders of the past half-century, Castro has been demonized by the corporate media as…
In the early hours of Nov. 26, President Raul Castro announced on Cuban state television that Fidel Castro, the former president and revolutionary leader, had died and would be cremated later in the day. “The commander in chief of the Cuban revolution died at 22:29 hours this evening (03:29 GMT Saturday),” he said. “Hasta victoria…
In this year’s annual United Nations vote on a resolution condemning the U.S. embargo of Cuba, the United States and Israel abstained for the first time in the 25-year history of the vote, rather than cast the lone votes against the resolution. The U.S. press celebrated this abstention as a major advance by Washington and…
By MILLY GUZMAN-YOUNG President Obama signed the PROMESA debt-restructuring bill into law imposing a Federal Control Board onto Puerto Rico that is comprised of seven appointed U.S. officials who will be in charge of the economy. I see PROMESA as a threat to the livelihood of my friends and family in Puerto Rico. It is…
Socialist Action reporter Ernie Gotta recently interviewed Francisco A. Santiago of Juventud Hostosiana (JH), a youth group for Puerto Rican independence affiliated with the Movimiento Independista Nacional Hostosiano (MINH). This article continues a series that Socialist Action is publishing on the movement against the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). You can…
By LAZARO MONTEVERDE Sept. 11, 2016, marks the 43rd anniversary of the violent 1973 coup in Chile against the elected left popular front government of Salvador Allende. Like the ancient Roman god Janus, imperialism has two faces. One face is political, the other economic. We must, if we wish to change the world, understand both…
By MANUEL AGUILAR MORA On July 18, in the National Palace at the enactment ceremony of a package of laws to create the National Anti-Corruption System (SNA), in front of an audience composed of hundreds of public officials, and flanked on both sides by the presidents of the houses of the Congress and secretaries of…
By WILLIAM WOOD — CHICAGO — On July 28, 75 people gathered in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago to Celebrate Cuba’s July 26 holiday and to demand that the U.S. government “End the Blockade of Cuba” and “Return Guantánamo.” As the most important revolutionary holiday in Cuba, the Day of National Rebellion commemorates the…
By ANN MONTAGUE In one of the early Democratic Party debates, in order to inflate her credentials as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton threw out an off-the-cuff comment about her relationship with Henry Kissinger: “I was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better—better than anybody had run it in a…
By NICK BAKER — SAN FRANCISCO — Miguel Fraga, first secretary of the Cuban Embassy, which opened last year in Washington, D.C., came to the Bay Area in March for a week-long tour, speaking to students and community members about life in Cuba, renewed U.S.-Cuba diplomatic relations, and the need to end the U.S. embargo…
By FIDEL CASTRO RUZ This letter by Fidel Castro is reprinted from the March 28 edition of Granma, published by the Cuban Communist Party. Brother Obama, We don’t need the empire to give us anything. Our efforts will be legal and peaceful, because our commitment is to peace and fraternity among all human beings who…
This report first appeared on the Left Voice website. It is an adaptation of an article by Josefina L. Martínez in La Izquierda Diario, a publication that reflects the views of the Argentine Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS). The Public Workers’ Association (in Spanish, the Asociación de Trabajadores del Estado, ATE) called the first public sector strike,…
By LISA LUINENBURG A huge number of refugees have been flowing across European borders in the last year, and this great migration crisis has had reverberations in the United States as well, where over 100,000 migrants fleeing violence in Central America arrived in 2015. As of Dec. 21, more than a million refugees have crossed…
By BARRY WEISLEDER The 50th anniversary of one of the biggest political massacres of the 20th century passed in the West almost without notice. In 1965, a military coup in Indonesia, backed by the United States, unleashed a slaughter that consumed over one million lives. The aim of the insurgent generals was annihilation of the…
By MARTY GOODMAN Enraged Haitians took to the streets in the thousands in the wake of the rigged Oct. 25 elections in Haiti. Protests took place throughout November in Port au Prince in support of the candidates, but were sometimes met with right-wingers armed with machetes, clubs, hammers, and guns, as cops looked on. One…
By MARTY GOODMAN In a clear attempt at ethnic cleansing, hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent have been rendered stateless under Dominican law. A series of racist court rulings on immigration in 2004, 2010, and 2013 paved the way for a dragnet based on race that might result in mass expulsions. A 2013…
By MARTY GOODMAN There has been a new wave of racist attacks on Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent inside the Dominican Republic (DR). The latest was the racist expulsion of 300 Haitians and Haitians of Dominican origin in the Ortega community in Moca. All Haitians in Moca were blamed for the April 8 death…
By CLAUDIO KATZ Mainstream media presented the Panama Summit as if it were the beginning of a new era of cooperation. They pondered the end of the Cold War and painted Obama as a model of detente, as opposed to the hawkishness of Maduro. They also contrasted the reintegration of Cuba in the region to…
By LISA LUINENBERG — MINNEAPOLIS — “Vivos los llevaron y vivos los queremos!” (“They took them alive and we want them back alive!”), chanted participants in a recent forum in solidarity with the parents and friends of 43 disappeared students from Aytozinapa, Mexico. On Sept. 26, 2014, municipal police opened fire on students of the…
By CHRISTINE MARIE Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, The State & Revolution: Soviet Family Policy & Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); La mujer, el estado y la Revolución (Buenos Aires: Pan y rosas and Ediciones IPS, 2012). On Oct. 10, the Marxist scholar Wendy Z. Goldman published a piece in Counterpunch entitled “The…
