Russia's February Revolution and the problematic origins of International Women's Day

Truth and memory

International Women's Day on March 8, 1917

Today is "International Women's Day" and over the internet socialists, communists, and well meaning persons are celebrating a holiday that was first celebrated on February 28, by the Socialist Party of America, but today's date, March 8th, is owed to a tragic history.

On March 8, 1917 (February 23 in the Julian calendar), tens of thousands of Russian women took to the streets of Petrogad (St Petersburg) in protest demanding "Bread and Peace" for the lack of food due to World War One, and within a week Czar Nicholas II had abdicated his throne in what became known as the February Revolution. This would lead eight months later to the October Revolution and the rise of the Bolsheviks and 74 years of totalitarian communist rule that led to tens of millions dead. The February Revolution that took place on March 8th in our Gregorian calendar is the origin of the reason that International Women's Day is celebrated today, and that is problematic. However, it is here to stay, the United Nations formally recognized it in 1975.

This legacy is reflected in the images spread over social media seeking to "empower" women within a revolutionary paradigm carrying heavy weapons, along with rhetoric of bringing down "capitalism, imperialism, fascism and colonialism" while ignoring how the Soviet Union allied with Nazi Germany, divided Central Europe into colonial possessions with Nazi Germany in August 1939, and created a communist empire that lasted until 1991.

More disturbing is that this revisionist history has taken over the Academy in the United States, and spread out into our educational institutions indoctrinating America's youth. For example, Anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee in her book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, makes the claim that women had it better under Communism. This is not true. Professor Ghodsee makes the following argument:

"In East Germany, Scandinavia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, political leaders supported the idea of women’s emancipation through their full incorporation into the labor force. These ideas soon spread to China, Cuba, and a wide variety of newly independent countries across the globe."

With the exception of Scandinavia, which we will return to later, the others are dystopian nightmares and the record on women leaves a lot to be desired. For the sake of brevity lets look at three countries that  Kristen Ghodsee mentions positively in her book.

 Romanian orphanages packed with children not receiving attention. Credit: The New York Times

Communist Romania
She makes some interesting claims that deserve closer scrutiny, especially citing statistics that women in Romania believed life was better under Nicolae Ceauşescu's communist regime.

"47 percent of women thought that state socialism was better for their country, only 42 percent of men said the same. Similarly, whereas 36 percent of men claimed that life was worse before 1989, only 31 percent of women said life under the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu was worse than the present."

Consider for a moment being born and placed in a cage as a newborn washed via a hose with cold water and never experiencing human touch. Fed like an animal and contracting HIV, hepatitis, and other diseases through dirty needles used to inject the child with vitamins. All of this done to sell children, as one would any other commodity, on the international black-market. Heartless capitalists? No, heartless Marxist-Leninists in the Ceausescu communist regime of Romania.

Nicolae Ceauşescu in a propaganda photo during his dictatorship

The Ceausescu regime decided in the mid 1960s that it needed to increase its population and in 2013 Scientific American explained how this crime was systematically planned out and its aftermath in the article Tragedy Leads to Study of Severe Child Neglect. Shannon Quinn authored the essay "17 Moments In History that Inspired the Handmaid’s Tale" in History Collection and provides a summary of Ceauşescu's Decree 770 policy for women.

One of the specific events that Margaret Atwood found during her research process was “Decree 770” in Romania. This was a law that passed in 1967 that made abortions and all forms of contraception illegal. This had nothing to do with religious beliefs. It was an action that the government believed was necessary for the future of their country. The government already taxed married couples a 6% income tax if they did not have children between the ages of 25 and 50, but they realized that this was not enough to stop people from using contraception.

During the 1950’s, Romanian women were entering the workforce and having fewer children. By the 1960’s, abortion became a common practice, because there were very few birth control options available to women to prevent pregnancy. This began a sharp dip in the country’s birth rate. The Communist Party wanted the population to increase from 23 million to 30 million in a single year, so they enacted Decree 770. After the change of law in 1967, and women no longer had access to birth control, the number of babies born that year skyrocketed to roughly double what they had been the year before. Thousands of new preschools and nursery schools had to be built. Orphanages were overflowing with children whose parents could not afford them.  Aside from making abortions illegal and taking contraception off of store shelves, women’s bodies were literally policed. Decree 770 forced women to visit the gynecologist once a month to check for pregnancy, and police officers stood in the halls to make sure women complied. If a woman was pregnant, the doctors followed her progress very closely. Wealthy women were able to buy birth control pills and condoms on the black market, but poor women did not have that option. There were some cases where women caught the pregnancy before the doctors did, and some women died while attempting to give themselves an at-home abortion. The policy continued until the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980’s.

Hundreds of thousands of children were subjected to this in Romania, and millions of women were forced to have children. This real world history inspired Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale,  but we are supposed to believe that Romanian women miss this?

Foreign tourists with young Cuban women at the beach

Communist Cuba
Professor Ghodsee in her book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, also makes the critique that women in post-Communist Eastern Europe are "once again commodities to be bought and sold—their price determined by the fickle fluctuations of supply and demand."  She makes no mention of widespread prostitution in Cuba, and the claim by Fidel Castro in May 2001, that Cuban prostitutes were the most educated.

"One day when I was down in Brazil, an Argentinian asked me 'Is it true that some girls who are university graduates sometimes practice prostitution?"' Castro said in a rare public reference to a highly sensitive subject for Cuba's government. "I replied instantly, without thinking, 'That proves prostitutes in Cuba have a university level,' " he added, laughing at the anecdote given during a lengthy  speech to close a Cuban workers' congress in Havana. [...] Castro gave no figures this time, whereas he had laced his 1998 speech with statistics like the fact that more than 6,700 prostitutes and around 190 pimps were rounded up in Havana in the first 11 months of that year. He also made no reference to Cuba's latest tactics in the fight on prostitution, which since 1998 has included the closure of bars and discotheques, night raids, the sending of thousands of women to rehabilitation schools, and new penalties for sex-related crimes like child abuse or pimping.

An online 2016 Travel guide repeats regime propaganda that prostitutes in Cuba are not driven by economic necessity, citing a speech of the late dictator claiming that "Cubans did not need to earn extra money by getting involved with tourists. The state took care of everything, so the women that were getting involved with foreign men did so for their pleasure." This is a lie, and there is much dire need in Cuba due to economic necessity that arises from a centralized communist economy. The reality is that prostitution never went away in Cuba, but went underground.

The difference between communist regimes and capitalist regimes is that you can complain in the latter and not be beaten, imprisoned, or killed because of your political views.

During Mao's Cultural Revolution thousands of young women were raped in camps

Communist China
China expert Frank Dikotter explained how in "1968, millions were sent to the countryside after they finished school, some of whom were girls as young as 14. Thousands of young girls were left at the mercy of villagers and raped.” Xinran  in her 2002 The Good Women of China described how young girls suffered the worse of the sexual horrors in the Cultural Revolution: "The perpetrators were their teachers, their friends, even their fathers and brothers, who lost control of their animal instincts." Mao died in 1976 and the decade long blood letting came to an end.

On September 26, 1980 The New York Times ran a UPI story reporting that "Chinese Reds Limited To a Child Per Family"  and euphemistically wrote  "China intensified its population-control drive today by ordering the 38 million Communist Party members to have only one child per family" and how the policy would use "painstaking patience and persuasion." Decade later Time Magazine reported in 2015 that "patience and persuasion" included "forced abortions and sterilization, and a gender imbalance resulting from female infanticide." 
 
Tom Hilditch in the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), reproduced in World Press Review, in September of 1995 described it as a "A Holocaust of Little Girls" and reported on the plight of a Chinese baby girl in an orphanage:

Mei-ming has lain this way for 10 days now: tied up in urine-soaked blankets, scabs of dried mucus growing across her eyes, her face shrinking to a skull, malnutrition slowly shriveling her two-year old body. The orphanage staff call her room the "dying room", and they have abandoned here for the very same reasons her parents abandoned her shortly after she was born. She is a girl. When Mei-ming dies four days later, it will be of sheer neglect. Afterward, the orphanage will deny she ever existed. She will be just another invisible victim of the collision between China's one-child policy and its traditional preference for male heirs. She is one of perhaps 15 million female babies who have disappeared from China's demographics since the one-child-per-family policy was introduced in 1979.

 Like, Senator Sanders, Professor Ghodsee mixes in Nordic countries with totalitarian regimes to make what she is advocating more palatable. Scandinavian countries are capitalist welfare states that respect private property rights, promote business, and respect both human rights and the rule of law. They are the antithesis of China, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Communist Eastern Europe. Fareed Zakaria on CNN detailed the reality of Scandinavian countries in the video below.

Why President Obama, Senator Sanders and conventional opinion are wrong about healthcare in Cuba

“There is nothing groovy about a dictatorship!” - Whoopi Goldberg

Sanders featured in Castro's official communist daily

Senator Sanders in the past made claims that were not true about Cuban resistance to Castroism in the first years of the Castro regime that this blog has addressed. Over the past couple of days, he has shifted the debate to claims about literacy and today healthcare while citing President Obama.

"I said this to President Castro in Cuba. Look you've made great progress in educating young people...Medical care. The life expectancy of Cubans is equivalent to the United States despite it being a very poor country because they have access to health care." – President Obama pic.twitter.com/pKDzvo3YpO

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 26, 2020

Before President Obama or Senator Sanders made their trips to Cuba those dissenting from their policy approach to Cuba would have recommended that they first read Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society if they did not want to be manipulated by the Castro regime.  This book studies and catalogs the strategies and tactics that these totalitarian regimes use to control what one sees visiting their respective countries and what the unintended consequences are for its victims: i.e. the people who have to live there. This is what it had to say about healthcare in Cuba from a past regime supporter as early as 1987, prior to the Special Period in the 1990s when it further worsened:

Maurice Halperin, a supporter of the Castro regime who lived in Cuba between 1962 and 1968 teaching at the University of Havana and working in the ministry of foreign trade ... reported on a "confidential public opinion poll made by the Communist Party in ... 1987" about public health conditions in Holguin province, provides a far less rosy picture of the vaunted health care system than one can find in much of the literature on Cuba under Castro. Of those polled (over ten thousand) 87 percent had unfavorable views of the health care they received. Most of the complaints "as summed up in the report concerned 'lack of attention, negligence and abuse of patients.'" There were also many complaints  "about the chronic absenteeism of both doctors and nurses and about favoritism in the treatment of well-connected patients."

The negligence and abuse have had deadly consequences. On January 15, 2010 The New York Times reported the confirmed deaths of at least 20 mental patients at the Psychiatric Hospital in Cuba, known as Mazorra, due to "criminal negligence by a government characterized by its general inefficiency," a day later the Cuban government confirmed that 26 patients had died due to “prolonged low temperatures that fell to 38 degrees.” This tragic episode only became known because brave souls leaked the information, and made it impossible for the dictatorship to cover it up.

Three of the victims of exposure and hypothermia at Mazorra in 2010

On December 28, 2017 the Spanish news service EFE reported that the Castro regime had dismantled a network of medical officials and workers who'd adulterated a medicine for children made at the laboratories of the state-owned drug company BioCubaFarma. They replaced the active substance methylphenidate with a placebo substance in the manufacture of the drug marketed as "Ritalin." The active substance was sold on the black market. Nevertheless, the Miami Herald had an article touting the importance of importing drugs from Cuba on December 14, 2017. 

The second book to have recommended the President, the Senator and their advisors would have been Katherine Hirschfeld's Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898. This anthropologist spent a long time in Cuba, studying the healthcare system, she contracted dengue while there experiencing first hand the 'discrepancies between rhetoric and reality,'  What she found was a repressive, bureaucratized and secretive system, long on 'militarization' and short on patients' rights. 

This would have saved President Obama from the embarrassing March 23, 2016 spectacle in  Buenos Aires, Argentina where he repeated the Castro regime's talking points on its healthcare system: 

“Medical care–the life expectancy of Cubans is equivalent to that of the United States, despite it being a very poor country, because they have access to health care.  That’s a huge achievement. They should be congratulated.”

It also would  have saved Senator Sanders from doubling down on a position that is factually incorrect. How is it that the same rational individuals that snicker at absurd North Korean healthcare claims take seriously Cuban healthcare claims? 

President Obama and Senator Sanders celebrate a system that coerces medical doctors to work for starvation wages around the world while the Castro regime makes billions of dollars.Worse yet, it has also potentially corrupted an international health body.

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) is being sued for conspiring "with the Cuban government to collect millions of dollars by unlawfully trafficking Cuban doctors to Brazil." (PAHO is the Regional Office for the Americas for the World Health Organization [WHO], and is recognized internationally as a part of the United Nations system.) According to a November 29, 2018 article by Frances Robles, in The New York Times, PAHO "made about $75 million off the work of up to 10,000 Cuban doctors who earned substandard wages in Brazil."

Sam Bernstein in a March 30, 2016 publication of The Advisory Board raised questions about the official statistics on health care in Cuba and how they are generated, raising questions about their validity.
 
Communist regimes in China and Cuba cover up epidemics targeting doctors and journalists
 
We have witnessed in China how communist regimes cover up a healthcare crisis making it worse. Doctors and journalists who tried to warn about the coronavirus were arrested.  Is this something to be congratulated or declared a huge achievement?  The Castro regime has repeatedly done the same thing in Cuba, and have endangered lives in the process.

In 1997 a Cuban doctor was silenced for warning about a deadly dengue epidemic. Dr Desi Mendoza Rivero, married with four children at the time, was arrested on June 25, 1997. On November 28, 1997 he was sentenced to eight years in prison for "enemy propaganda." Amnesty International declared Desi a prisoner of conscience and campaigned for his freedom. He was released on November 20, 1998 due to health reasons following the visit of the Spanish Foreign Minister,  under the condition that he go into exile in Spain.

First official report to the World Health Organization of the dengue outbreak was six months after initial identification made by the jailed and later forcibly exiled physician. Mendoza's reports were eventually confirmed. This episode would have a chilling effect on other doctors coming forward.

News of a cholera outbreak in Manzanillo, in the east of the island, broke in El Nuevo Herald on June 29, 2012 thanks to the reporting of an independent reporter in the island. Calixto Martinez, the independent Cuban journalist who broke the story was jailed. The state controlled media did not confirm the outbreak until days later on July 3, 2012. The BBC reported on July 7, 2012 that a patient had been diagnosed with Cholera in Havana. The dictatorship stated that it had it under control and on August 28, 2012 said the outbreak was over. 

In July 2013 an Italian tourist returned from Cuba with severe renal failure due to Cholera. New York high school teacher Alfredo Gómez contracted cholera during a family visit to Havana during the summer of 2013 and was billed $4,700 from the government hospital. A total of 12 tourists were identified who had contracted cholera in Cuba.

On August 22, 2013 Reuters reported that Cuba was still struggling with cholera outbreaks in various provinces.

In a August 22, 2019 New York Times article by Carl Zimmer, "Zika Was Soaring Across Cuba. Few Outside the Country Knew", the newspaper tries to shift the blame for an unreported outbreak of Zika in Cuba in 2017 on a reporting glitch. This ignores a decades long government pattern of covering up epidemics.

"Until now, the Pan American Health Organization had no record of any Zika infection in Cuba in 2017, much less an outbreak. Following inquiries by The New York Times about the new study, published in the journal Cell, officials acknowledged that they had failed to tally 1,384 cases reported by Cuban officials that year. [...] Officials at P.A.H.O., an arm of the World Health Organization, blamed the failure to publish timely data on the Cuba outbreak on a “technical glitch.” The information was held in a database, they said, but not visible on the website. By Thursday afternoon, the website had been updated."

On August 25, 2016 this blog raised concerns about the reporting on Zika in Cuba. This was done by looking back at past Castro regime responses to previous epidemics, and expressed skepticism of reporting that claimed their was nothing to worry about.

On September 2, 2016 this blog again warned about the dangers of Zika and Associated Press reports that Cuba had "remarkable success in containing Zika virus." This report made no mention of the regime's past history of covering up epidemics on the island. On January 8, 2019 New Scientist reported: "Cuba failed to report thousands of Zika virus cases in 2017."

Medical care denied as punishment 

Human rights defender Sebastián Arcos Bergnes, in 1992 was charged with "enemy propaganda" and "inciting rebellion," he was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison. Sebastian was transferred to Ariza Prison in  Cienfuegos Province,  more than 130 miles from Havana, where he was imprisoned alongside dangerous criminals and systematically denied medical attention. In 1993 the regime offered Sebastian a deal: He would be released immediately if he only agreed to leave the island for good. Sebastian rejected the deal, choosing prison in Cuba over freedom in exile.

Sebastián Arcos Bergnes in front of his home on May 31, 1995 following his release

After an international campaign that included his designation as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience and a request by France Libertés, the organization founded by former French first lady Danielle Mitterrand, Sebastian Arcos was released in 1995. A few weeks after his release, Arcos was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in the rectum, for which he had previously been denied medical care in prison. After a Cuban doctor was fired from his post for diagnosing Arcos, he traveled to Miami for further care. Sebastián Arcos Bergnes died in Miami on December 22, 1997

 

Sirley Avila Leon.  Sirley was a true believer who grew up in the revolution and was a member of a local municipal assembly. She believed the claims that free education was a right for all Cubans. This belief left her an invalid and nearly led to a violent death. She lobbied and agitated for a school to be opened in her municipality so that the children there would not have to trek 5.6 miles to go to class and then trek the same distance back to get home.

Sirley Avila Leon

On May 24, 2015, Sirley Ávila León was the victim of a brutal machete attack that cost her her left hand and also left her right upper arm nearly severed and knees slashed, leaving her crippled. She was denied adequate medical care and was told quietly by medical doctors that if she wanted to get better she would need to leave Cuba. The regime had been embarrassed by a campaign she organized to keep a school open. She arrived in Miami on March 8, 2016 unable to bend her legs, or use her remaining had.Thanks to a team of medical doctors treating her, by September 2016 Sirley had regained the use of her hand, and was able to walk short distances.

Lady in White Xiomara Cruz was arrested on April 16, 2016 for speaking out during a human rights demonstration in Havana's Central park. She was placed on parole in January of 2018. She was re-arrested in mid-September 2018 under the charge of being "threatening." On September 19, 2018 she was tried and sentenced to one year and four months in prison. She was sent to a prison 400 kilometers from her home. This was an added hardship for her family to visit her, and keep an eye on her well being.

Xiomara de las Mercedes Cruz Miranda before and during her jailing.

Over the course of one year in custody of the Castro regime her health radically declined. Rashes that appeared on her body in June 2019 that Cuban medical doctors in Ciego de Ávila claimed to be unable to diagnose. In mid-July she was returned to Havana to La Covadonga hospital. 

On August 8, 2019 she was transferred to intensive care. Cuban dissident Angel Juan Moya posted videos of interviews from August 6th and August 7th with doctors at the hospital. Family members complained that they are receiving differing diagnoses and her situation continues to worsen. Xiomara was in intensive care and doctors were saying that it could be lung cancer. A doctor refused to update the family saying: "that he did not want to see those people."

Near death she arrived in Miami on January 21, 2020 on a humanitarian visa, and was immediately placed in intensive care.

Xiomara de las Mercedes Cruz Miranda arrived in Miami on January 21, 2020

Reality of Cuba's healthcare system
Cuba has a two tiered health care system one tier for the nomenklatura and foreign tourists with hard currency that offers care with modern equipment and fully stocked pharmacies, then there is a second tier which is for the rest with broken down equipment, run down buildings and rooms, scarce supplies, a lack of hygiene, the denial of certain services and lengthy wait times. Healthcare professionals are poorly paid and lack food.  

The communist dictatorship has also punished dissidents by denying them healthcare, or not providing adequate healthcare. 

There are serious consequences for travelers to Cuba when they are not properly informed with what to expect with Cuba's public health failures and the disastrous state of Cuban healthcare. Not to mention a hefty bill for catching Cholera while on vacation, or worse yet discovering that you had been exposed to Zika virus when your child is born with microcephaly, a serious birth defect.

The healthcare claims about Cuba made by both President Obama and Senator Sanders are but one of the many myths propagated by the Castro regime that do not hold up under scrutiny.

Paltering or when the truth is not the truth: Summary executions, Soviets put down 1959-66 Cuban uprising

"Facts are stubborn things." - Ronald Reagan


Senator Bernie Sanders in his remarks on both Cuba and China in tonight's CNN Townhall is engaging in paltering, which is the art of deceiving with true statements. He also omitted inconvenient truths, and fudged on some facts ignoring context. This is a continuation of what he did in the 60 Minutes interview broadcast the night before.

He argued in the 60 Minutes interview that the reason Cubans did not rise up against Castro in 1961 was because "he educated their kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society, you know?"

Senator Sanders is wrong on three counts.

Anti-communist guerrillas in Cuba in the early 1960s

First, Cubans did rise up against the Castro regime.  Between 1960 and 1966 there was an insurgency in the mountains of the Escambray that fought the Castro regime made up mostly of farmers and Revolutionary Directorate rebels that had fought the Batista Regime demanding a democratic restoration. The dictatorship called it the "War against the Bandits." Tom Gjelten in his book Bacardi and the Long Fight for Freedom gives an account of what took place:

The peasants in the Escambray Mountains, an independent group even during the anti-Batista struggle, took up arms again, this time in opposition to the government's heavy hand. Castro had taken a lesson from Batista's hapless efforts at counterinsurgency, however, and he responded to the Escambray guerrillas with more force and ruthlessness than Batista had dared employ. With the guidance of Soviet counterinsurgency experts, Castro sent thousands of army troops into the mountains to pursue the guerrillas. Captured Escambray insurgents were often executed on the spot, and in a move reminiscent of the Spanish army's "reconcentration" strategy during the independence war, Castro ordered the relocation of entire villages where the guerillas enjoyed mass support. The villagers were moved en masse to western Cuba, where they could be closely monitored. 

The guerrillas were eventually exterminated and the uprising was crushed by 1966, but the Castro regime had to obtain outside assistance to destroy the resistance,  and they obtained it from hundreds of  Soviet counterinsurgency "advisors."  It was described by Mary O'Grady in The Wall Street Journal in 2017 as a "Soviet cleansing." 

Eusebio Peñalver with machine gun and Joaquin Membibre, with M-1 carbine.

 Not all were killed in the field or executed. Eusebio Peñalver (pictured above) opposed the Batista regime and fought with the rebel army to restore Cuba's constitutional democracy. Mary O'Grady wrote about him in 2013 and quoted the Cuban warrior. "But when Castro hijacked the revolution for himself, Peñalver broke ranks rather than 'sell my soul to the same devil that here on earth is Castro and communism.'" He took up arms against Castro's military in the Escambray Mountains, he was captured in October 1960. He spent 28 years in Cuban prisons and was banished from the island upon his release in 1988. "From exile in Los Angeles he wrote about the 'naked brutality' and round-the-clock beating and harassment that he had endured: 'They made the men eat grass, they submerged them in sewage, they beat them hard with bayonets and they hit them with fence posts until their bones rattled.' I knew Eusebio, and in 2000 we toured campuses in Southern California where he shared his experiences. We were deeply saddened when he passed away in 2006. Others were not so lucky.

 Secondly, the Castro revolution executed thousands of Cubans, locked up hundreds of thousands of Cubans, built a police state, with the assistance of the KGB and the East German Stasi, and imposed revolutionary terror to consolidate power. Credible and conservative estimates of the Castro regime’s death toll against Cuban nationals ran from 35,000 to 141,000, with a median of 73,000. In the beginning executions were televised in Cuba to terrorize the populace. 

Che Guevara addressing the United Nations on December 11, 1964 did not mince words: "We must say here something that is a well-known truth and that we have always asserted before the whole world: executions? Yes, we have executed people; we are executing people and shall continue to execute people as long as it is necessary. We know what the result of a losing battle would be and the worms also have to know what the result of the lost battle is today in Cuba."

 Third, Fidel Castro lied about his true intentions, because he knew that if he had told Cubans that he was a communist he would never have taken power. On December 2, 1961 he explained his reasoning.

"If we had paused to tell the people that we were Marxist-Leninists while we were on Pico Turquino and not yet strong, it is possible that we would never have been able to descend to the plains."

Years later on March 26, 1964, after announcing that he had always been a Marxist Leninist, Fidel Castro explained: "I conceive the truth in terms of a just and noble end, and that is when the truth is truly true. If it does not serve a just, noble and positive end, truth, as an abstract entity, philosophical category, in my opinion, does not exist." Jose Ignacio Rasco, who knew Fidel Castro from school and afterwards concluded that the Cuban revolutionary had been a committed communist by 1950. Listening to Senator Sanders discuss truth tonight, reminded me of the late communist leaders view of truth.

These are the truths that Senator Sanders omitted, but let us examine his claims of the literacy program that he used to distract from what actually happened between 1959 and 1966.

Senator Bernie Sanders: "When Fidel Castro first came to power, which was when 59? That sound right? Ok, you know what he did? He initiated a major literacy program. There was a lot of folks in Cuba at that point who were illiterate. He formed a literacy brigade and they helped people to learn to read and write. You know what I think teaching people to read and write is a good thing."

It it true that the Castro regime, in the early days of the Revolution carried out a literacy campaign between January and December 1961. This was part of a propaganda offensive for both internal and international consumption. Senator Sanders makes the claim that "there was a lot of folks in Cuba at that point who were illiterate."

Let us examine that claim further. According to the 1953 Cuba census, out of 4,376,529 inhabitants 10 years of age or older 23.6% were illiterate, a percentage lower than all other Latin American countries except Argentina (13.6%), Chile (19.6%), & Costa Rica (20.6%). Factoring only population 15 years of age or older, the rate is lowered to 22.1% ( Source: Alvarez Díaz, José R. “A Study on Cuba .” Cuban Economic Research Project. Coral Gables : University of Miami Press, 1965. pg 426-427.)  According to UN statistics other Latin American countries achieved similar or better outcomes without becoming Communist. There are other myths that are worth exploring about the Castro regime's supposed achievements.

Senator Sanders: "I have been extremely consistent and critical of authoritarian regimes all over the world, including Cuba, including Nicaragua, including Saudi Arabia, including China, including Russia. 

For the sake of time did a google search of "Bernie Sanders" "criticism" and "Fidel Castro." What I found going back decades was an apologist of the Castro dictatorship with a deep admiration for the communist dictator. I also found a communist critique of Castroism, but it was not by Senator Sanders, but Slavoj Zizek.

 
Senator Sanders: I happen to believe in democracy not authoritarianism, but you know you can take China as another example. China is an authoritarian country, becoming more and more authoritarian, but can anyone deny, I mean the facts are clear, that they have taken more people out of extreme poverty than any country in history. Do I get criticized because I said that? That is the truth, so - that is a fact, end of discussion." ...  "Truth is truth, all right? 

He left out that under Mao over 45 million people were starved to death during the Great Leap Forward. That at least another million were killed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and that the brutality of the system continues to the present day with the descendants of that first generation of communist leadership. He also failed to point out the role Western Democracies have played in building up and empowering this monstrosity.

Senator Sanders: If you want to disagree with me, if somebody wants to say that — and by the way all of the Congress people you mentioned just so happen to be supporting other candidates ... but you know, the truth is the truth. And thats what happened in the first years of the Castro regime."

The whole truth is the truth, not the strategically incomplete version that Senator Sanders has presented on the national stage. There is one last item that Senator Sanders left out, that would bother a democrat, but not a hardcore Marxist Leninist, that there is no morality beyond whatever serves you to take power. Vladimir Lenin stated it clearly in a speech to Russian communist youth on October 2, 1920:

"The class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated to that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society."

 This is why Fidel Castro denied being a communist, why Hugo Chavez called Fidel Castro a dictator during his first presidential campaign, and why Senator Sanders claims to be critical of Cuba and Nicaragua, when he has been a long time apologist, and made no mention of Venezuela that is currently the victim of an authoritarian regime that has generated millions of refugees.

MSNBC analyst warns if Castro had won Cold War there would've been executions in Central Park; asks what Sanders thinks of Castro

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." - Mark Twain

Chris Matthews warns of the dangers of communism on MSNBC

Taken from CubaBrief
On February 7, 2020 MSNBC analyst Chris Matthews was right when he said, "I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay? So I have a problem with people who took the other side."   He also raised the point that he was unsure about "who Bernie has supported over these years, I don't know what he means by socialism -- one week it's Denmark, we're going to be like Denmark. Okay, that's harmless. That's basically a capitalist country with good social welfare programs. Denmark."  Matthews continued, "What does he think of Castro? That's a good question, what's he think of Fidelismo?"

Reason Magazine in June 2019 produced an overview of Senator Sanders political views throughout his career titled "Why Bernie Sanders' Communist Misadventures Still Matter."  They point to a lifetime of statements and actions that demonstrate solidarity with communist dictatorships in Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Soviet Union.

Senator Sanders field staff caught on video advocating political violence.

There have also been video recordings of Senator Sanders field staff advocating political violence, justifying Gulags and re-education camps in the United States.  Americans should not ignore the threats coming from some young members of Sanders’ campaign team about the kind of country they want to build.

"I have an attitude toward Castro. I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I mighta been one of the ones getting executed... and certain other people would be cheering." - @HardballChris pic.twitter.com/4W2I2yzeuS

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) February 8, 2020

Election 2016: A Reflection

 Failure of the political and media elite fuel Trump and Sanders phenomenons in both parties

Anti-system candidates: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders

Donald Trump officially won the Republican nomination for President of the United States last night in Cleveland. The question many are asking is: How did the country get here? Consider the following facts and the reasons for the political earthquake become clear.

A silent epidemic
African Americans in the United States can expect to live until age 76, while white Americans are likely to live until age 79, on average there is a 3.4 year difference. This is an improvement over previous years with both African Americans and Hispanic mortality rates steadily dropping. However since 1995 white mortality rates have dropped at a slower rate when compared to other groups. Worse yet between 1999 and 2014 mortality rates among middle class whites have actually increased while that of other racial groups have continued to decline. Main causes of this increased mortality are: suicide, chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis, alcohol and drug poisoning.

This trend is not being repeated in other European countries. According to a December 2015 Princeton study this "silent epidemic" has claimed half a million lives and can be traced to distress in the population with the inability to find work a major factor. There is also new data that points to increasing mortality not only among middle age but also young whites. How does all this relate to the 2016 presidential election? According to Jeff Guo in The Washington Post on March 4, 2016 Donald Trump performed the best in places where middle-aged whites are dying the fastest.

Economic distress
The official government unemployment figure is 4.9% but other reliable and more accurate statistics range between 6.3% on the low end to  the U6 unemployment range which is 9.9%. More controversial but accepted in some quarters is John Williams' Shadow Government Stats that places June 2016 unemployment at 22.9%. These numbers provide plenty of room for despair. First is the fact that official numbers promoted in the mass media are not necessarily accurate.

Secondly, the disappearance of higher paying manufacturing jobs has been the result of trade agreements that have negatively impacted U.S. workers but at the same time has benefited and enriched a powerful few.  Most of U.S. manufacturing ended up in mainland China and has assisted in modernizing that country and its military which is now expanding in the region and making itself felt worldwide to the detriment of U.S. national and security interests. How has this bipartisan China policy benefited the average American? This is not being discussed on the national stage.

If the political and media elite are unwilling even to address the problem with accurate statistics then what hope is there of solving the problem?  This is why the Trump and Sanders phenomenons erupted on the national political scene. Voters are frustrated.

Exacerbating racial tensions
Meanwhile rather than having this national conversation the debate has been returned to the old obsession and the so-called "original sin" of the United States: Race.

Consider for a moment that according to The Washington Post 990 people were killed by police officers in 2015 out of  a total of 12.2 million arrests with nearly half of all killed being white non-hispanics followed by a little over a quarter that were African American and 17%  who were hispanic.  A disturbing subset of data was the statistical breakdown of 93 unarmed individuals killed by the police in 2015 with four out of ten being African American followed by three out of ten being white non-hispanics and nearly two out of ten hispanics. Meanwhile there were 42 police officers shot and killed in 2015.

There is a problem that needs to be addressed but it has been magnified and distorted by the media and political actors to create the sensation of a clear and present danger for African Americans when being stopped by the police facing a great risk of being killed. The high profile killing of police in the United States in reaction to a media campaign demonizing the police will also have an impact in the presidential election.

It is interesting that those publicly mentioned as possibly funding Black Lives Matter have an interest in maintaining the status quo on trade and globalism in the United States and avoiding a national conversation on these two subjects. This brings us to a topic that the political and media elite are at odds with the majority of the citizens of the United States and that is immigration.

Illegal immigration and changing the political culture
Fredo Arias-King served as senior adviser to the National Action Party of Mexico during its presidential campaign in 1999–2000.  In July of 2006 he wrote an important paper for the Center for Immigration Studies titled "Immigration and Usurpation: Elites, Power, and the People’s Will" about the disconnect between public opinion and elite actions in the United States with regards to illegal immigration.

Arias-King speculated in this paper what motivated U.S. politicians to tolerate and even encourage the phenomenon of illegal immigration and where it could eventually lead predicting the rise of a Trump-like candidate that could seize the immigration issue to respond to the demands of a populace outraged at the lack of response from the political class.

Samuel Huntington speculated that the American "creed" (values and beliefs) cannot be used to openly oppose mass immigration.¹⁶ That may change. So far, the immigration debate has centered on the immigrants themselves—whether they are worthy or unworthy. This debate is a red herring, since average Americans are unusually kind and restrained in the face of mass immigration, something that cannot be said about other nations (including Mexico).¹⁷ Recent poll findings from Zogby challenge the popular belief that the average American somehow has negative or overtly prejudicial feelings toward Mexicans in particular.¹⁸ However, Huntington did not take into account the possibility that the debate could yet be framed in terms of potential usurpation from the political class using immigration as a tool. If an organizeable mass of Americans comes to suspect that mass immigration from Latin America is being used by the political class to undermine their democracy and as a tool to liberate the political elites from the Jeffersonian and Madisonian constraints, then indeed we may witness a reaction—but hopefully not against the immigrants themselves, as they are also objects of elite manipulations in more than one country. The Founding Fathers also prescribed a cure for usurpation. Hopefully the American people will not apply it so literally, for the sake of those legislators.

The conclusion reached by the author that the American political class was using mass immigration to change the electorate in order to make the citizenry more malleable and thus politicians able to get away with being less accountable was a controversial proposition in 2006 but seems much less so today. The loss of faith in governing institutions in the United States by large sectors of the electorate is behind the success of Donald Trump, a business man with no political experience and Bernie Sanders, a socialist with a communist background who honeymooned in the Soviet Union in 1988. However Sanders was against open borders and globalization but his support for an amnesty for 11 million in the United States probably cost him the nomination.

Shadows in the Fall: Foreign policy
Foreign policy failures are felt here in the United States. The argument that we fight them over there to avoid fighting them over here rings hollow in the electorate who are now backing a candidate who opposed the war in Iraq.  Terror attacks linked to Islamic extremism have impacted across the nation in recent years: Orlando, Florida (2016),  Chattanooga, Tennessee (2015), San Bernardino, California (2015), and Boston, Massachusetts (2013). Meanwhile events in Turkey point to an ominous new turn with Erdogan's consolidation of power, purges, and crushing of the military following what appears to have been a coup with a counter-coup underway that could lead to the rise of a fully Islamic regime in NATO. The cry of "who lost Turkey?" may become a theme in the foreign policy debate in the presidential election in the United States this fall. There are other hot spots in the world and Libya can be blamed directly on Hillary Clinton.

These are trying times for the American Republic and the social, political, and media elite had best wake up, look out for the interests of their fellow citizens, and how to rebuild the middle class or get out of the way.