International Day of Non-Violence 2023: Join Cubans' non-violent movement for restoring democracy and human rights to Cuba

 "Use truth as your anvil, nonviolence as your hammer, and anything that does not stand the test when it is brought to the anvil of truth and hammered with nonviolence, reject it." - Mohandas Gandhi

"Era tanto el hambre que nos comimos el miedo." - "The hunger was so much that we ate the fear."

Juan Enrique Pérez Sánchez, father of four and former phone technician, was arrested and badly beaten on July 12, 2021 after participating in the 11J protests in Nueva Paz, Mayabeque. He carried a poster that read "Down with the dictatorship" on one side, and "The hunger was so much that we ate the fear."  Juan Enrique was sentenced to eight years in prison on December 15, 2021. He suffers from asthma and a herniated disc. Reports emerged over social media that Juan Enrique sowed his mouth shut with a wire, as a sign of protest.

Today in Cuba there are thousands of Cubans, like Juan Enrique, jailed for their nonviolent demand for an end to the Castro dictatorship expressed most widely during the July 2021 protests. Over a thousand have been identified that were jailed or disappeared. It is known that some have resorted to going on hunger strike to protest their unjust imprisonment. This is part of the movement's repertoire of nonviolent tactics to resist the dictatorship in Cuba.

The men and women in Cuba who have led protests across the island have maintained their non-violent posture, continue to call for civic resistance as the method to challenge the dictatorship, and are asking for active nonviolent solidarity from people of goodwill living abroad. 

On July 27, 2021 the Christian Liberation Movement tweeted: "For solidarity with the freedom of Cubans. Eleven specific actions to isolate the regime."  This Cuban based movement, with its national coordinator, a former Amnesty prisoner of conscience living in Cuba, said that although statements criticizing the dictatorship are welcome that now is also the time for actions to isolate the Castro regime internationally, and sanction both on the dictatorship collectively, and individual bad actors in the regime are needed. These efforts to raise the cost of repression too are part of strategic nonviolence, and requires international solidarity. Please share and support this campaign with others.

Por la solidaridad con la libertad de los cubanos. Once acciones concretas de aislamiento al régimen. Movimiento Cristiano Liberación https://t.co/upvduDXpZu

— MCL (@oswaldopaya) July 27, 2021

This is a moment in which many that have not been following the resistance movement on the island are advocating to do business with the dictatorship, and the children of the nomenklatura. This will only prolong the life of the dictatorship, and increase the likelihood of violence, and Cuba bottoming out as a failed state.

It is important to revisit recent Cuban history.

The opposition in Cuba violently resisted the Castro dictatorship from 1959 to 1966.  In April of 1961 an expedition covertly supported by the United States was not provided sufficient air cover and support leading to their defeat, and the consolidation of communist rule in the island. Many of the Cubans who had fought alongside Castro, but felt betrayed when he installed a new dictatorship instead of restoring the democratic order, took up arms and went back into the hills. The new regime received counter insurgency forces from its Soviet allies that sent  to battle the Cuban resistance in the Escambray after years of struggle in 1967.

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

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.'

Total number of dead in this phase of the resistance remains unknown, but tens of thousands were jailed for decades. On January 28, 1976, within the Cuban prisons, dissidents and former members of the resistance came together to found the Cuban Committee for Human Rights.  This initiative to document human rights abuses in Cuba, and report them to the international community marked  the start of a non-violent resistance to the Castro dictatorship.

 

Many movements would emerge over the next 47 years. It would be impossible to list them all. However, it would be worthwhile to highlight some that still exist today on the island. The Christian  Liberation Movement was founded in 1988, and in May 2002 with the Varela Project, a citizen initiative that thousands of Cubans signed, and led the Castro regime to change the constitution in an effort to block it, and brought international attention to Cuba's pro-democracy movement, and the democratic aspirations of the Cuban people.

Oswaldo Payá Antonio Diaz, and Regis Iglesias turn in petition

In 1991 the Cuban Youth for Democracy Movement came into existence calling for free thought in Cuban education, and a return to university autonomy.

Cuban Youth for Democracy Movement

 In 1997 the Lawton Foundation was founded by Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet and sought to educate Cubans on human rights and strategic non-violence, explicitly embracing the legacies of Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. 

Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet

In 2003 following a major crackdown on the opposition due to the Varela Project initiative and overall growth in the democratic resistance the Ladies in White came into existence and through non-violent actions challenged the Castro regime to free their loved ones and to change the totalitarian penal code that creates prisoners of conscience. In 2011 following his release from eight years in prison, Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia founded the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU).  

In 2018, following the announcement that the Cuban dictatorship would further restrict artistic freedoms with Decree 349, a collective of artists formed the San Isidro Movement to campaign against the repressive law. 

Logo of the San Isidro Movement

What they all have in common is the decision to use nonviolent means and strategies to challenge the Castro dictatorship. However, they are not advocating collaboration or going into business with the oppressors.

Human action is a powerful force that must not to be underestimated, but to maximized it requires knowledge, strategic planning and courage. It also requires an understanding of the real nature of political power.

Professor Gene Sharp, a nonviolent theoretician who passed away on January 28, 2018, in his book, Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential, recognized that political power is "the totality of influences and pressures available for use to implement, change, or oppose official policies for a society." This means that political power "may be wielded by the institutions of government, or in opposition to the government by dissident groups and organizations."

According to Gene Sharp the sources of political power include "authority, human resources, skills and knowledge, intangible factors, material resources, and sanctions."

If we look at Cuba, the communist dictatorship there uses propaganda claims, both internally and internationally, to assert that the regime has achieved successes in education and health care. These are pillars of legitimacy and authority for the Castro regime. The dictatorship has also trained and staffed a massive intelligence apparatus to monitor and surveil the populace in Cuba trained by the East German Stasi and the Soviet KGB with 64 years of experience.

There is a large military that is heavily embedded in the Cuban economy, including tourism. In the area of skill and knowledge there is a dictatorship with 64 years of experience of imposing itself through violent means on the populace in Cuba, and overseas in places such as Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Venezuela. They have had experience in carrying out mass killings that rise to the level of genocide to assist client regimes. These first generation leaders are dying out, but many remain, including Raul Castro that have this knowledge and expertise in repression and terror.

One must consider the best course of action with the greatest likelihood of success while taking into account conditions on the ground.

Conservative activist Morton Blackwell explained a truth often ignored by activists of all ideological stripes in a talk titled "The Real Nature of Politics," which is required reading and offers three conclusions.

"1. Being right in the sense of being correct is not sufficient to win.  You don't win just because your heart is pure, even if you can prove logically that you are right.

2. The winner in a political contest over time is determined by the number and the effectiveness of the activists and leaders on the respective sides.

3. The number and effectiveness of the activists and leaders on a given side in a political contest is determined by the political technology used by that side."

These conclusions work both in a political struggle within a democratic order, and in confronting a dictatorship that does not play by democratic rules.  

These three ideas need to be present when planning resistance to the dictatorship in Cuba.

Providing more resources and legitimacy to the dictatorship and their networks of supporters, while marginalizing democratic forces is a recipe, already witnessed in Communist China for strengthening and modernizing the dictatorship in Beijing that turned into a greater threat to the rest of the world, and did nothing to advance democracy.

Considering that the Cuban opposition in the island over the past 47 years decided to resist the Castro dictatorship using nonviolent means, that the democratic resistance today as evidenced by the start of the July 11, 2021 uprising did so non-violently, and that concrete calls for help from the island are asking for nonviolent solidarity both inside and outside of Cuba now is the time to step up with the support requested, and not resort to the siren call of embracing the dictatorship providing it with more resources and legitimacy that has failed in the past against this regime.

Today, October 2nd is the international day of nonviolence and the 154th birth anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi. On this day let us remember our nonviolent icons in Cuba and share their message with the world, and continue to carry out concrete actions to restore democracy, the rule of law, and isolation and accountability for those engaged in human rights violations.

 

"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’." - Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas

 

“If we must give our own lives in pursuit of the freedom of our Cuba, so be it.” - Laura Pollán

Join the non-violent movement for democracy and human rights in Cuba

"Use truth as your anvil, nonviolence as your hammer, and anything that does not stand the test when it is brought to the anvil of truth and hammered with nonviolence, reject it." - Mohandas Gandhi

Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara on day six of hunger strike in Cuba

Today in Cuba there are thousands of Cubans jailed for their nonviolent demand for an end to the Castro dictatorship expressed during the mid July 2021 protests. Hundreds have been identified that were jailed or disappeared. It is known that some have resorted to going on hunger strike to protest their unjust imprisonment. Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara is on a hunger strike that he began on September 27, 2021 and is still weak from a bout of COVID-19, and prior hunger strikes. This is part of the movement's repertoire of nonviolent tactics to resist the Castro regime.

Over the past few months some voices emerged in the diaspora calling for: a military response from external powers, the diaspora to arm themselves and invade Cuba or Cubans on the island to rise up violently against the dictatorship. The men and women in Cuba who have led protests on the island have maintained their non-violent posture, continue to call for civic resistance as the method to challenge the dictatorship, and are asking for active nonviolent solidarity from abroad. 

On July 27, 2021 the Christian Liberation Movement tweeted: "For solidarity with the freedom of Cubans. Eleven specific actions to isolate the regime. Christian Liberation Movement."

Por la solidaridad con la libertad de los cubanos. Once acciones concretas de aislamiento al régimen. Movimiento Cristiano Liberación https://t.co/upvduDXpZu

— MCL (@oswaldopaya) July 27, 2021

They said that although statements criticizing the dictatorship are welcome and needed that now is also the time for actions to isolate the Castro regime internationally, and sanction both the dictatorship collectively, and individual bad actors in the regime. These too are part of nonviolence, and requires international solidarity. Please share and support this campaign.

On August 25, 2021 the San Isidro Movement tweeted: "Help Civil Society - Look at the manual for non-violent struggle" and provided a link to their documents on strategic nonviolence, and how people of good will can help.

Ayuda a la Sociedad Civil - Mira el manual de la lucha no violenta. https://t.co/zbIqx4VpWv#EstamosConectados

— Movimiento San Isidro (@Mov_sanisidro) August 25, 2021

This is a moment in which many that have not been following the resistance movement on the island may believe that a quick violent action can remove this entrenched dictatorship. The opposition that has taken to the streets in Cuba does not advocate this, but are asking for supporters to be non-violent.

The rest of this essay seeks to provide an overview of the opposition's decision to opt for nonviolence, and how adopting violent resistance plays into the hands of the Castro regime.

The opposition in Cuba violently resisted the Castro dictatorship from 1959 to 1966.  In April of 1961 an expedition covertly supported by the United States was not provided sufficient air cover and support leading to their defeat, and the consolidation of communist rule in the island. Many of the Cubans who had fought alongside Castro, but felt betrayed when he installed a new dictatorship instead of restoring the democratic order, took up arms and went back into the hills. They were defeated by the regime and its Soviet allies that sent counter insurgency forces to battle the Cuban resistance in the Escambray after years of struggle in 1967.

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

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.'

Total number of dead in this phase of the resistance remains unknown, but tens of thousands were jailed for decades. On January 28, 1976, within the Cuban prisons, dissidents and former members of the resistance came together to found the Cuban Committee for Human Rights.  This initiative to document human rights abuses in Cuba, and report them to the international community marked  the start of a non-violent resistance to the Castro regime.

Many movements would emerge over the next  45 years. It would be impossible to list them all. However, it would be worthwhile to highlight some that still exist today on the island. The Christian  Liberation Movement was founded in 1988, and in May 2002 with the Varela Project that thousands of Cubans signed onto forced the regime to change the constitution to counter it, and brought international attention to Cuba's democratic opposition. 

Oswaldo Payá Antonio Diaz, and Regis Iglesias turn in petition

In 1991 the Cuban Youth for Democracy Movement came into existence calling for free thought in Cuban education, and a return to university autonomy. In 1997 the Lawton Foundation was founded by Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet and sought to educate Cubans on human rights and strategic non-violence, explicitly embracing the legacies of Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. 

Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet

In 2003 following a major crackdown on the opposition due to the Varela Project initiative and overall growth in the democratic resistance the Ladies in White came into existence and through non-violent actions challenged the Castro regime to free their loved ones and to change the totalitarian penal code that creates prisoners of conscience. In 2011 following his release from eight years in prison, Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia founded the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU).  

In 2018, following the announcement that the Cuban dictatorship would further restrict artistic freedoms with Decree 349, a collective of artists formed the San Isidro Movement to campaign against the repressive law. 

What they all have in common is the decision to use nonviolent means and strategies to challenge the Castro dictatorship.

Human action is a powerful force that must not to be underestimated, but to maximized it requires knowledge, strategic planning and courage. It also requires an understanding of the real nature of political power.

Professor Gene Sharp, a nonviolent theoretician who passed away on January 28, 2018, in his book, Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential, recognized that political power is "the totality of influences and pressures available for use to implement, change, or oppose official policies for a society." This means that political power "may be wielded by the institutions of government, or in opposition to the government by dissident groups and organizations."

According to Gene Sharp the sources of political power include "authority, human resources, skills and knowledge, intangible factors, material resources, and sanctions."

If we look at Cuba, the communist dictatorship there uses propaganda claims, both internally and internationally, to assert that the regime has achieved successes in education and health care. These are pillars of legitimacy and authority for the Castro regime. The dictatorship has also trained and staffed a massive intelligence apparatus to monitor and surveil the populace in Cuba trained by the East German Stasi and the Soviet KGB with 62 years of experience.

There is a large military that is heavily embedded in the Cuban economy, including tourism. In the area of skill and knowledge there is a dictatorship with 62 years of experience of imposing itself through violent means on the populace in Cuba, and overseas in places such as Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Venezuela. They have had experience in carrying out mass killings that rise to the level of genocide to assist client regimes. These first generation leaders are dying out, but many remain, including Raul Castro that have this knowledge and expertise in repression and terror.

One must consider the best course of action with the greatest likelihood of success while taking into account conditions on the ground.

Conservative activist Morton Blackwell explained a truth often ignored by activists of all ideological stripes in a talk titled "The Real Nature of Politics," which is required reading and offers three conclusions.

"1. Being right in the sense of being correct is not sufficient to win.  You don't win just because your heart is pure, even if you can prove logically that you are right.

2. The winner in a political contest over time is determined by the number and the effectiveness of the activists and leaders on the respective sides.

3. The number and effectiveness of the activists and leaders on a given side in a political contest is determined by the political technology used by that side."

These conclusions work both in a political struggle within a democratic order, and in confronting a dictatorship that does not play by democratic rules.  

These three ideas need to be present when planning resistance to the dictatorship in Cuba. 

The decision to confront with a violent strategy a regime with 62 years of expertise in exercising violence as an instrument of control with overseas experience in carrying out mass killings that rise to the level of genocide is a brave but foolish stand with little if any chance for success.

University academics and nonviolent theoreticians Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth in their 2008 study "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic on Nonviolent Conflict" compared the outcomes of 323 nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006. They found that major nonviolent campaigns achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with just under half that at 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns.

Even the 26% figure needs to be looked at in the Cuban context.

The above mentioned Stephan, Chenoweth study also suggests “that nonviolent campaigns are more likely than violent campaigns to succeed in the face of brutal repression.” This depends on the nonviolent opposition movement having a strategic vision and maintaining its non-violent posture even under the worse repression. However, according to Stephan and Chenoweth, the more brutal the regime the better the results with nonviolent resistance and the worse the outcomes with violent resistance. 

Long time Castro ally Bashar Hafez al-Assad with Raul Castro

This can be seen in Syria with long time Castro ally Bashar Hafez al-Assad. The uprising against Assad in 2011 was initially nonviolent and despite brutal repression by the Syrian regime the nonviolent opposition registered great victories. However, when elements of the Syrian military defected and the resistance abandoned its nonviolent posture in the belief that violent resistance would achieve change faster. The end result, rather than undermine the Assad regime, changed the entire dynamic of the struggle to a terrain favorable to Bashar Hafez al-Assad. The body count of the opposition skyrocketed, popular mobilization evaporated, Al Qaeda inflitrated the ranks of the opposition leading to international support drying up, and the Syrian dictatorship consolidated its rule.

Considering that the Cuban opposition in the island over the past 45 years decided to resist the Castro dictatorship using nonviolent means, that the democratic resistance today as evidenced by the start of the July 11, 2021 uprising did so non-violently, and that concrete calls for help from the island are asking for nonviolent solidarity both inside and outside of Cuba now is the time to step up with the support requested, and not resort to the siren call of violence that has failed in the past against this regime.

Today, October 2nd is the international day of nonviolence and the 152nd birth anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi. On this day let us remember our nonviolent icons in Cuba and share their message with the world, and continue to carry out concrete actions to restore democracy, the rule of law, and accountability for those engaged in human rights violations.

"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’." - Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas

“If we must give our own lives in pursuit of the freedom of our Cuba, so be it.” - Laura Pollán

 

 

Marxists despised Gandhi when he was alive, but today misrepresent him and his nonviolent legacy

“War is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.” - George Orwell, 1984

Don't know about you, but I'm sticking with Gandhi not Critical Theory Marxists

Came across Judith Butler's statement of "the paradoxical possibility of a nonviolent violence" in the chapter on "Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Violence" found in the 2012 book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism and thought of the above phrase by Orwell. Benjamin was German born, and a member of the Frankfurt School who committed suicide in 1940 out of fear that he would be repatriated to the Nazis.

In a July 23, 2020 lecture Butler conflates social inequality with violence, and this combined with the earlier idea of a "possibility of a nonviolent violence." Butler also views that nonviolence "does commit us to a notion of radical social equality."

Simon Critchley, professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in a March 17, 2011 presentation at  UC Berkeley "Why War? / Non-Violent Violence" focused "on how such a politics [of nonviolence] has to negotiate the limits of nonviolence and in what circumstances it might become necessary to transgress those limits. The complex necessity for such transgression will be captured in Judith Butler’s paradoxical formulation, ‘nonviolent violence.’" It is available online.

The clear message found in both Butler and Critchley is that capitalism is objective systemic violence, and must be radically resisted and violence is not off the table as an option. They also regularly speak from the Marxist tradition of analysis.There is a lot of talk about Marx, Lenin, and Bakunin. Critchley gives a definition of non-violence as "a carefully constructed fuck you."

Critchley also references the Marxist scholar Slavoj Zizek who argued that there is a divine violence. Adam Kirsch in July 26, 2010 in The New Republic revealed that "violence, Zizek said in his letter, was using force 'to really change things,' and Hitler did not really change things (because, as the old Communist interpretation runs, fascism was really just capitalism unmasked). 

[ This is ironic, because the origins of fascism are a variant of Marxism. Benito Mussolini was a Marxist before he was a fascist. Both movements trace their origins to the French Revolution and the Jacobins. Winston Churchill, in 1948 in the first volume of his memoir The Second World War, Volume 1, The Gathering Storm outlined the origin and the evolution of this political idea as follows. "Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism… As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction." It is also interesting that Marxists tend to ignore that WW2 started when the Communists, and Nazis joined together in an alliance against Western Democracies on August 23, 1939 and invaded Poland in September in 1939 and their armies met in the middle to celebrate together.

Marxists and fascists both share contempt for liberal democracy and capitalism while focusing on a group or class of people that will come to be the rulers of the future. The fascists view it through a nationalist prism through "a people" while the Marxists through universalist prism with "the proletariat".  In both cases the end result was a totalitarian dictatorship with concentration camps in the first and Gulags in the second, and massive body counts in both.  Neither can accept that nonviolence can achieve real change because both ideologies believe in violent struggle as the only means to achieve "real change." ]

This leads to some bizarre conclusions to reconcile with the historical record and Slavoj Zizek engages in it. As an example of what he meant by true violence, Zizek rather surprisingly adduced Gandhi: 'In this precise sense of violence, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler: Gandhi’s movement effectively endeavored to interrupt the basic functioning of the British colonial state.'"

This is the ultimate misrepresentation of Gandhian nonviolence. Marxists believe in class struggle that at its core is a belief that violence is necessary to achieve real change. Gandhi described himself as a socialist, but his Marxist critics viewed him very differently.

The Soviet press published an article written by S.M. Vakar in 1948 following Gandhi's assassination on January 30, 1948 titled "The Class Nature of the Gandhi Doctrine" subtitled "Gandhi as a Reactionary Utopian" in the Soviet philosophy journal Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy). The Marxist Leninist argument was outlined as follows:

Although Gandhi regarded the union and independence of the Indian peoples as his goal, his reactionary-Utopian social theory and the reformist methods of struggle connected with it caused his activity to fail in facilitating overthrow of the colonial yoke [...] The social essence of the Gandhi doctrine and its fundamentally reactionary role in the history of India's national liberation movement has hardly been treated in Marxist literature. Yet this doctrine still retards the development of class awareness among the Indian masses.

What was this social essence of Gandhian thought that so troubled the Communists in the Soviet Union? First, the reformist methods of struggle referred to in the above quote and secondly Gandhi's social theory rejected class struggle as another manifestation of destructive violence. 

On September 11, 1906 a new word came into existence that gave a better understanding of Gandhi's social theory and method of struggle which he defined as:

'Satyagraha.' Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement 'Satyagraha,' that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase 'passive resistance,' in connection with it, so much so that even in English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word 'Satyagraha' itself or some other equivalent English phrase.

Marxist-Leninists embraced revolutionary violence and a movement led by a small vanguard of intellectuals and professional revolutionaries that would carry out the changes necessary by whatever means necessary and rejected nonviolence as naive. They followed the doctrine of Lenin as presented in his 1902 revolutionary tract What is to be done.

Over a century passed with both sets of ideas set out and applied around the world. An analysis done by Maria J. Stephen and Erica Chenoweth systematically explored the strategic effectiveness of both violent and nonviolent campaigns using data on 323 campaigns carried out between 1900 and 2006.[1] There findings demonstrate that major non-violent campaigns were successful 53% of the time versus only 26% for major violent campaigns and terrorist campaigns had a dismal 7% success rate.

Today, India with all its flaws is the world's largest democracy with a growing economy that presents new competitive challenges to the developed world and Marxist-Leninism has amassed a body count of 100 million dead and counting. It would appear that Gandhi's criticisms of the communists were prescient:

"The socialists and communists say, they can do nothing to bring about economic equality today. They will just carry on propaganda in its favor and to that end they believe in generating and accentuating hatred. They say, when they get control over the State, they will enforce equality. Under my plan the State will be there to carry out the will of the people, not to dictate to them or force them to do its will." - Mohandas Gandhi

"It is my firm conviction that if the State suppressed capitalism by violence, it will be caught in the coils of violence itself, and will fail to develop non-violence at any time. The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence." - Mohandas Gandhi

Slavoj Zizek in order to not abandon his philosophical outlook and recognizing the above history than comes to the grotesque conclusion highlighted above that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler, because otherwise he would have to leave behind his erroneous Marxist ideology.

Exploring Critical Theory is a tedious affair, but necessary to understand what is happening in academia, and how it is now spilling out into the real world.  It is a bit disturbing how it is providing a narrow Marxist perspective to the great tradition of nonviolence that stretches back centuries, and was perfected in the 20th century by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and their commitment to nonviolence was clear and unambiguous.  

What is shocking is that Gandhi is subjected to woke attacks, while Angela Davis embraced and supported Reverend Jim Jones who led 900 of his followers into a mass suicide and murdered a Congressman and four others who visited his colony in Guyana. But all becomes clear when we understand that Marxists are running the show, they cannot abandon violence because it is intrinsic to Marx's class struggle and in Angela Davis they see a comrade, and in Mohandas Gandhi an enemy.

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was captured and killed On October 8, 1967 but his bloody legacy is being visited on American streets today

 "Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy." - Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental (1967)

53 years ago today in Bolivia

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was captured and killed On October 8, 1967 after attempting to violently over throw the government of Bolivia with an armed insurrection.

The Argentine guerilla was a failure who advocated guerilla warfare and violent insurrection to overthrow existing governments around the world and replace them with communist dictatorships. It led to a generation of right wing military juntas in South America.  And the one place where it succeeded, Nicaragua, has a left wing authoritarian dictator Daniel Ortega, who also has a lot of blood on his hands.

Guevara's siren call to violence also impacted on the streets of American cities generating an escalation in violence and costs in lives lost, injuries, and hundreds of millions in material losses. The CIA report "DISSIDENT ACTIVITY: January 1966 through January 1973" approved for release on June 19, 2003 described a dire situation in 1967 that "[a]lthough severe racial rioting had occurred in U.S. cities in previous summers, it never had been as widespread or as intense as it became in 1967. In the two cities hardest hit, Newark (26 dead) and Detroit (43 dead), conditions of near-insurrection developed in ghetto areas, and police and National Guardsmen responded with volleys of automatic weapons fire."

Lamentably, Guevara's image and his writings have been shared around the world, including by UNESCO, and today cities are again burning, and foreign influence is again suspected. We should not be surprised that the cost in 2020 is over a billion dollars, a new and historic record..

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was also an advocate of nuclear war if it meant destroying the imperialists declaring in November 1962: "What we affirm is that we must proceed along the path of liberation even if this costs millions of atomic victims.”

Many were not taken in by this call to mass murder. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. told his staff in 1968 to combat the “romantic illusion” of Che Guevara style guerilla warfare among young radicals concluding: “We must not be intimidated by those who are laughing at nonviolence now.”

Critics of nonviolence like to point out that Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968, but fail to mention that he succeeded in transforming the United States into a better country by successfully and nonviolently addressing historic injustices.

What did Reverend King accomplish? He led the successful Montgomery bus boycott that ended segregation on buses in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956. He led the Birmingham campaign in 1963 that faced off with the Birmingham Police Department, led by Eugene “Bull” Connor, who used high-pressure water jets and police attack dogs on children. The campaign ended with Connor losing his job and the city’s discriminatory laws were changed.

Reverend King played an instrumental role in the August 28, 1963 march on Washington, D.C. with over 250,000 participants. It was done to pressure for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 in Alabama demonstrated African Americans desire to vote. The violence by local authorities, racists, and the Klu Klux Klan and the nonviolent resistance of the civil rights activists were key to passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. These laws gave African Americans political power that had been denied them.

 

 

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was executed in Bolivia in 1967. What did he accomplish? Installing a communist dictatorship that killed thousands, and left millions in misery. Inspired guerrilla wars and international terrorism across the world that in Latin America helped give rise to a new generation of military dictators to combat the guerrilla threat. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro created the conditions for Augusto Pinochet to become the dictator of Chile. This is but one example.

Reverend King spent the last few hours of his life making the prophetic Mountaintop speech courageously predicting that he would not lead a long life and campaigning for the rights of poor people. What about Che? He was hunted down, while trying to overthrow the Bolivian government to impose a communist dictatorship and executed while trying to beg for his life.

 

After the death of Martin Luther King Jr., groups inspired by Guevara's writings wreaked havoc and led to the victories of Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972 with his promise of restoring law and order.  

Both the civil rights leader and the communist revolutionary died at the age of 39. However their legacies could not be more different.

Progressive Claims There Are Lessons for American Police in Cuba? Do Black Lives Matter in a Communist Police State?

Do Black Lives Matter in Cuba?

Silverio Portal Contreras, prisoner of conscience

The Progressive, a publication founded in 1909 in Madison, Wisconsin claims to question anything, but when it comes to Cuba it has swallowed hook, line, and sinker the misinformation of the Castro regime on policing. On June 18, 2020 they published an article titled "Foreign Correspondent: Police Lessons From Cuba" by Reese Erlich that claims "Contrary to the image of brutal and repressive communists, police in Cuba offer an instructive example for activists in the United States."

On the same day Havana Times published an article by IPS-Cuba titled "Is it legal to Take Photos or Videos of Police in Cuba?" The case of George Floyd became known because his death was recorded by a civilian who witnessed the events as they transpired, and then uploaded the video and shared it with others. Now the question is would it be legal to do that in Cuba? 

According to Cuban lawyer Humberto Lopez asked last Wednesday June 10th, on an episode of his “Hacemos Cuba” TV show "recording the police officer isn't illegal or constitute a crime" but “if this image is uploaded onto a digital platform without this person’s consent, then you are using it without their authorization,”would violate the right to privacy of the police officer under Article 48 of the Cuban Constitution. The Cuban attorney added "that if the intent of the publication is to defame police actions (he didn’t say if it mattered if these actions were right or wrong), it is an administrative violation, which is subject to a fine, because it violates Decree-Law 370 passed in 2018, by the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications." 

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Therefore, if the United States adopted this Cuban approach any person recording a police officer, then sharing that image on a digital platform would be violating their right to privacy, and if what they record the police officer doing, whether his or her actions were right or wrong, they would be fined and if they did not pay the fine would be subject to prison.

A law, patterned after Cuba's, would require those who record police on or off the job to get the approval of the police officer recorded before sharing the video with any digital platforms. Thankfully, the First Amendment prohibits such restrictions in the United States, and also runs afoul of international human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which Cuba is a signatory, even though the document is censored in the island.

According to a January 13, 2020 report in The New York Times a former high-ranking judge in Cuba provided documents which "showed that approximately 92 percent of those accused in the more than 32,000 cases that go to trial in Cuba every year are found guilty. Nearly 4,000 people every year are accused of being “antisocial” or “dangerous,” terms the Cuban government uses to jail people who pose a risk to the status quo, without having committed a crime." Furthermore, the article says that "records show that Cuba’s prison system holds more than 90,000 prisoners. The Cuban government has only publicly released the figure once, in 2012, when it claimed that 57,000 people were jailed."

Based on the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research, according to the January 13, 2020 article by EuropaPress, Cuba today has the largest per capita prison population in the world.

The United States, in contrast to Cuba, offers regular reports on its prison system, and allows the International Committee of the Red Cross access to its prison, including high security areas such as the prison at the Guantanamo Naval Base. The reason that so much is known and documented about the abuses with regards to the prisoners there is because the International Committee of the Red Cross has visited the U.S. Guantanamo detention facility over 100 times since 2001.

Meanwhile over the past 20 years the Cuban government permitted no visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross to Cuba's prisons. The Castro regime considered allowing a visit in 2013, but decided against it.

The Castro regime has demonstrated by not allowing international observers into its prisons that it is out of sight out of mind from most international indices, and gets the benefit of the doubt from "progressive publications."

Nevertheless there are moments that highlight the brutality of the regime.

Three black men executed by firing squad for trying to leave Cuba.

Lorenzo Enrique Copello Castillo, Bárbaro Leodán Sevilla García, and Jorge Luis Martínez Isaac, were shot by firing squad following a speedy "trial" in 2003 for trying to leave Cuba. On April 2, 2003 eleven Cubans hijacked a ferry traveling to Regla from Havana with 40 people on board with the intention of traveling to the United States of America but ran out of fuel 28 miles off the Cuban coast and were towed back to the island.  Despite verbal threats made against the safety of the passengers to maintain control of the vessel, the situation, according to the authorities, ended without violence and that “all of those who had been on board were rescued and saved without so much as a shot or a scratch.”
The hijackers were tried by the "Court for Crimes against State Security of the People’s Court of Havana. The Court had applied the specially expedited summary proceeding contemplated in Articles 479 and 480 of the Criminal Procedure Act, and found guilty. They appealed their sentence, and it was quickly denied.  Unlike in the United States the Judiciary in Cuba is not independent of the Executive.

In the early morning of April 11, 2003, following the decision handed down by the Council of State, the sentences were carried out and Lorenzo Enrique Copello Castillo, Bárbaro Leodán Sevilla García, and Jorge Luis Martínez Isaac were executed by firing squad. Nine days after the hijacking and three days after the trial.

The Cuban government also knew how to handle the aftermath and avoid negative publicity.

Family members were informed of their loved ones' summary executions after they had already been buried.

​ Ramona Copello mourns execution of her son Lorenzo Enrique in 2003

Ramona Copello, Mother of Lorenzo Enrique Copello interviewed by the Associated Press described how: "They came to my home at 6 in the morning and knocked on the door and told me to go to the cemetery at 10:00. He was already dead and buried. Go to the cemetery at 10 (am) so we can tell you where your relative is buried. That was it. He was already buried, he was covered. I asked and implored and even kneeled so they would let me see his face. Since they are liars, I couldn't believe it was him. I uncovered the crypt. I uncovered it because I wanted to see if it was really him, but I couldn't see his face because the security and police arrived and so I didn't get to see his face. I'm not sure if it's my son or a dog buried there."

Lorenzo Enrique was 31 years old and left behind a widow and an 11 year old daughter, who last saw her dad on April 10, 2003. He worked as a caretaker in a health center.

Bárbaro Leodán Sevilla executed in 2003

On April 12, 2003 the Spanish newspaper El Pais on how another family reacted. "According to eyewitnesses, in the neighborhood of Central Havana, where Bárbaro Leodán Sevilla lived, who was 21 years old, some incidents were recorded when the execution was reported to his family. Sevilla's mother suffered a nervous breakdown upon hearing the news and went out of the house shouting against the government and crying, to which dozens of neighbors joined. The police arrived to control the situation and kept the area cordoned off all day long."

On April 25, 2003 Fidel Castro appeared on television to defend the three executions, and show trials against nonviolent dissidents that had taken place in parallel. The official transcript left out unscripted comments by the old dictator who referred to the three executed men as the "tres negritos" which translates into English as the "three pickaninnies."

Unlike in the United States, all mass media in Cuba is controlled by the Cuban Communist Party, and any embarrassing or inconvenient statements can be disappeared and erased from public view.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a black Cuban prisoner of conscience was subjected to systematic physical and psychological torture between 2003 and 2010, and following his death on February 23, 2010 was subjected to a campaign of vilification by Cuba's Communist authorities. Orlando's mother, Reina Luisa Tamayo, denounced her son's mistreatment and held up a blood stained shirt that belonged to her son, who had been beaten up by prison guards, for rejecting communist re-education and continuing to denounce human rights violations in the prisons.
 

​ Reina Luisa Tamayo, with her son's bloody shirt

Ten years have passed since his untimely death, but many inside and outside of Cuba continue to demand justice for him and his family. The poster below reads "Tenth Anniversary of his Martyrdom: His Murderers Continue Without Being Tried" and underneath it reads "Orlando Zapata Tamayo: Martyr  for the Liberation of the Cuban people" followed by his birth date and the day he died.

Black lives matter, without question but the question that necessarily arises is do they matter everywhere, regardless of ideology? 

It necessarily arises because the leadership of the Black Lives Matter organization, despite the above examples (which are the tip of the iceberg) never raised these cases, but instead mourned the death of Fidel Castro in November 2016 and more shockingly defended what today is a old, male and white minority dictatorship in Cuba. 

Will progressives speak up about continuing injustices against black Cubans such as Silverio Portal Contreras, an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, who is now serving a four-year prison sentence for "contempt" and "public disorder"? He was beaten by prison officials in mid-May 2020 and lost sight in one eye.

Do black lives matter in Cuba? Is the monstrous Cuban police state what progressives want to turn the United States into?