Forging Resistance to the War on Cuba at New York’s Malcolm X Center and Beyond

Diana Block

 April 4, 2025
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Photo from the U.S. Cuba Normalization Conference website

As the Trump/Rubio diabolical duo devise new attacks against Cuba, hundreds of activists gathered at New York City’s Malcolm X Center over the March 15-16 weekend to strategize how to strengthen solidarity organizing in the U.S. and Canada. Marking the centennial of Malcolm X’s birth (born on May 19, 2025), this year’s US-Cuba Normalization conference was dedicated to the memory and legacy of Malcolm X and uplifted the decades of connection between the Cuban and U.S.-based Black liberation struggles. It also spotlighted the achievements of Cuban women through the presence of a strong delegation from the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) and the National Union of Cuban Jurists (UNJC) who were in New York to attend the 69th annual United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) events.

As the call to the conference made clear, Trump and Rubio took office “with daggers drawn, fully committed to ratcheting up renewed aggression against Cuba.” On day one, Trump put Cuba back on the fraudulent State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) list, less than a week after Biden had belatedly removed it. Immediately after that, Trump trampled on Cuban sovereignty by designating the Guantánamo Bay military base, a site notorious for torture and abuse, as a detention center for deported migrants. To date, $40 million has been spent on jailing fewer than 400 migrants there. On January 30th, Marco Rubio placed sanctions on Orbit, the company which allowed families in the U.S. to send remittances to Cuba which tens of thousands of Cubans rely on. And on February 25th, Rubio took the unprecedented step of threatening to revoke U.S. visas for government leaders whose nations hire Cuban physicians and nurses from Cuba’s famed medical brigades. He fallaciously claimed that these medical professionals are enduring “human trafficking” and “forced labor.” In the face of these intensifying assaults, conference participants committed to ramp up and broaden our solidarity strategies.

Throughout the conference, speakers drew on the spirit of Malcolm X and the long legacy of Cuban-Black solidarity to point the way forward. In September 1960, Malcolm X and Fidel Castro held a midnight meeting, memorialized in the book Fidel and Malcolm X – Memories of a Meeting, at Harlem’s Black-owned Hotel Theresa after the Cuban delegation to the U.N. was refused service by the downtown hotel they had originally reserved. That historic meeting laid the basis for shared principles which would be put into practice over decades. Five years after his meeting with Fidel, Malcolm was assassinated on February 21, 1965 at the venue where the Normalization conference was held (then called the Audubon Ballroom). Columbia University’s plans to destroy this historic building were defeated by a community struggle led by Olive Armstrong of the December 12th movement. The result was the transformation of the building into the current Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center.

In her remarks to the conference, Noemi Rabaza the Vice President of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), drew out the many linkages between Malcolm and the Cuban people. She emphasized, “We learn from Malcolm X and Fidel that hope is a weapon.” Leima Martínez, Director of North American ICAP, explained in her remarks that ICAP was founded by Fidel in December of 1960, a few months after his meeting with Malcolm, “with the call ‘the cause of the oppressed is one’, from Cuba to Harlem, from Africa to Latin America.” She imagined that if Malcolm and Fidel were to meet today they would be discussing the urgent need to stop the genocide against the people of Palestine and the economic war against Cuba as well as the continuing oppression of Black people in the U.S. “Together, they would remind us that the struggle is not a story of the past, but a present mandate.”

“From the very origin of the Cuban revolution, African people have played an integral part in the liberation of Cuba and Cuba has repaid that debt by playing an integral role in the liberation of people all over the African continent,” declared Onye Chatoyer, one of the co-chairs of the Normalization Conference as well as a co-chair of the National Network on Cuba and a leader of the Venceremos Brigade. Sam Anderson, a founding member of Harlem’s Black Panther Party and of the National Black Education Agenda reiterated that idea when he introduced a delegation that had participated in the International Conference for People of African Descent in Cuba this past December. He spoke highly of the commitment Cuba has had to fighting racism within their country and praised the progress that had been made, declaring that “Cuba is an African-centered country.”

Young members of the New York delegation, who had visited Cuba for the first time for the December conference, talked about how they found that the commitment to fighting racism was real. They described how they were able to connect with many Cubans of African descent not only at the conference but in the cities and towns that they visited. They were impressed by the grassroots Afro-descendent neighborhood networks that are being built to carry on the struggle against racism in different communities. They learned about the creative programming of the Karibuni Sociocultural Project, which promotes the quality of life and empowerment of Black women and preserves and promotes ties between Cuba and Africa. One such project pairs young Cubans with elders to collect oral histories about their participation in the liberation wars in Africa. The delegation concluded that tiny Cuba remains a threat to the U.S. because it continues to demonstrate the power of its socialist project through superior education, health care and culture. Its internationalist mission means that people all over the world experience the footprint of Cuban socialism ,which is one of the reasons for Rubio’s cynical attack on the international medical missions.

Rosemari Mealy, author of Fidel and Malcolm X – Memories of a Meeting, reflected on the importance of Fidel and Malcolm’s leadership in challenging patriarchy and misogyny, something which is often overlooked. She cited Malcolm’s statement in 1962 that “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman“ and his call to fight for education and rights for all Black women as a necessary response to this oppression. She pointed to the significance of the Federation of Cuban Women, founded in 1960 by Fidel and Vilma Espin, which took up the work of advancing women’s rights, education, and reproductive health immediately after the revolution.

Representatives of the Cuban Women’s Federation (FMC) and the National Union of Cuban Jurists were present at the conference in conjunction with their participation at the activities of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. This year’s UN events focused on the 30th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. The UN’s Beijing +30 Women’s Rights in Review, to which Cuba contributed, summarizes the achievements and the enormous challenges that exist globally in advancing the original Beijing Platform for Action.

At the conference’s Reproductive Justice workshop, Osmayda Hernández, International Relations Director of FMC, discussed universal access to reproductive health services in Cuba, which include the right to pregnancy interruption (abortion) for all who get pregnant. She pointed to the significant progress represented by the updated Cuban Family Code ratified by a popular referendum in 2022. The Code legalized equal marriage and equal adoption rights regardless of sexual orientation,the right to assisted reproduction and the rights of surrogate mothers. It recognized women’s work in the household, and the role of grandparents in the family. In her address to the UN the following week, Hernández summed up many of these points and more as part of Cuba’s National Program for the Advancement of Women.

Hernández and Yamila González Ferrer, Vice President of the National Union of Cuban Jurists, acknowledged ongoing challenges in the implementation of the Family Code, including violations of LGBTQ rights, and described how community forums and the courts are both used in Cuba to uphold these rights. González Ferrer gave an example of the legal processes employed to ensure the rights of minors in regard to pregnancy interruption. She pointed out the problem of limited availability of contraceptives due to the U.S. blockade. She also spoke of the effect that emigration from Cuba due to economic hardship is having on the family structure. Because of the increasing strangulation of Cuba’s economy by the blockade and its designation on the State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) list, young people have been emigrating away from Cuba at an increasing rate. This has meant that many Cuban elders no longer have the support from their children that they have traditionally enjoyed. At the same time, more elders are caring for children of family members who have emigrated. The Cuban government is working on a national policy to ensure the well-being of the people in an effort to respond to the crisis of emigration.

The Action Plan that was adopted by conference participants emphasized the need to maximize travel to Cuba as the best way to refute the constant lies and distortions that are perpetrated by the U.S. government and press. The Actiion Plan prioritized mobilization against the SSOT list and the need to build opposition to HR 450, the Force Act which prohibits the removal of Cuba from the SSOT list. It calls for promoting all forms of material aid to Cuba, building connections between worker struggles in the U.S. and Cuban workers, expanding work with the 2.4 million Cubans who live in the U.S. and opposing the use of Guantánamo Bay as a mass deportation detention center. The Action Plan also called for the freedom of Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil who had been arrested six days before, a concrete expression of the solidarity with Palestine that was voiced throughout the conference.

In his closing speech at the conference, Cuban ambassador to the U.N. Yuri Gala López underscored the denunciation by many government leaders of the U.S. threats against their visas if they continued their cooperation with Cuban medical brigades. “I will prefer to lose my US visa than to have 60 poor and working people die,” declared St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves. Gala López went on to highlight the visit that Cuban President Diaz-Canel paid to the Malcolm X Center in September 2023 where he paid tribute to Malcolm and all those “who believe, just like Malcolm and Fidel did,that a better world is possible.” Gala López expressed Cuba’s gratitude for those in the U.S. who share this visionary belief and declared that the U.S. could damage but never achieve its main objective which was to bring Cuba to its knees.“We are on the right side of history. Our conviction prevails that Cuba will win.”

Since the beginning of the Cuban revolution, this conviction has been embodied in its well known slogans. Venceremos and Hasta la Victoria Siempre have resonated and galvanized resistance struggles around the world because they are not just rhetorical or idealistic assertions. They are rooted in the concrete accomplishments of the Cuban socialist project and its resolve, despite all odds, to carry them forward. As we in the U.S. movement strive to resist the fascist imperialist onslaught, Cuba’s exemplary determination continues to offer us guidance and inspiration. Venceremos!

Diana Block works with the Bay Area Cuba Saving Lives Committee. She is a founding and active member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners , an abolitionist organization that celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2020. She is the author of a memoir, Arm the Spirit – A Woman’s Journey Underground and Back (AKPress 2009), and a novel, Clandestine Occupations – An Imaginary History (PM Press 2015). She writes for various online journals.  

 AU CONTRAIRE

Academic Freedom Under Attack: From the Government But Also From Within

Robert Jensen

 April 4, 2025
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Universities in the United States are facing one of the most serious attempts to impose political control on higher education since the anticommunist loyalty tests of the 1950s. Whatever one thinks of the issues being debated today, such as the Israel/Palestine conflict, playing politics with federal funding is a threat to open inquiry. Administrators and faculty are scrambling to respond and resistance is strengthening, although Columbia University’s capitulation to the Trump administrationisn’t heartening.

It’s too early to write an obituary for academic freedom, but whatever the outcome of these battles, universities in the United States have lost prestige that won’t be regained quickly. Though it’s difficult to critically self-reflect when under attack, I think we academics should consider our mistakes when trying to understand public opinion and political realities.

I retired from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018 and now live in a rural area, and so I’m far from the front lines. I empathize with former colleagues, but I can’t help but reflect on those colleagues’ failures in the past to offer a robust defense of academic freedom in cases in which I was in the crosshairs. So, while at the same time that we organize to defend higher education, I want to highlight two episodes from my career that raise an important question: Where do threats to academic freedom come from? Not always from government officials.

To be clear: I never faced the kind of threats that some professors and institutions do today, such as deportations and terminating entire academic programs. But I have seen how social penalties can be effective in silencing people, as illustrated by the censure from my bosses because of writing I did after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the shunning that came after my critique of the ideology of transgenderism. In both cases, censure and shunning didn’t change my behavior but did have an effect on choices that others made.

9/11 and the failure of a university

One of the most important decisions a country can make is the choice to go to war. In a healthy democratic culture, that decision should be thoroughly debated before political leaders deploy troops in battle. But within hours after the 9/11 attacks, politicians of both parties were climbing over each other to get to microphones to call for a military response.

I spent most of that day in my office watching the news coverage while trying to reach friends in New York to make sure they were safe. My memory of the day is blurry, but I remember clearly that by mid-afternoon—before anyone even had a clear understanding of the details of the events—it seemed inevitable that the United States would bomb someone, somewhere in retaliation. Whether it would be legal or sensible was irrelevant—politicians were preparing to use the terrorist attacks to justify war. By the end of that day, I had written the first of many articles sharply criticizing US foreign policy and arguing strongly against going to war.

Not everyone agreed with me. For weeks, my voicemail and inbox were filled with critics who described me as a coward, a traitor, unpatriotic, and/or unmanly. (The most revealing, in a psychological sense, were the messages from men who imagined the sexual punishment I deserved, including being raped by Osama bin Laden.) After that article ran in the state’s largest newspaper and became a topic on conservative talk radio, people began calling for the university to fire me. Within two weeks, the president of the University of Texas at Austin responded publicly, calling me “misguided” and describing me as “an undiluted fountain of foolishness.”  (He was a chemist, not a poet.) Other university officials added their own denunciations, some of which were forwarded to me, but none of my bosses confronted me directly. Because I was a tenured professor with considerable job protection, none of them moved to fire me.

The criticism continued for a few months, but I continued to write and speak out. At the time, I was already a part of a small national network opposing US militarism, and the support of people in that movement sustained me. Locally, we formed the group Austin Against War to organize protests and do political outreach. Around the country and throughout the world, many people defied the jingoist rhetoric and challenged that militarism.

The university president’s statement had no effect on my activity, but it was effective in a larger sense. Many UT faculty members shared my views, yet only a handful joined the initial organizing efforts, I assume at least in part because of fear of being targeted as I had been. One untenured professor I knew stopped speaking out against militarism after his dean told him that continuing to circulate critical writing would almost certainly cost him his job, and I assume others made similar choices. Several graduate students from other countries told me they wanted to get involved in antiwar organizing but were afraid it could lead to the US government revoking their visas. Faculty colleagues with lawful permanent resident status who were from Muslim-majority countries on a special-registration list created the following year (the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System) told me they feared that the government would revoke their green cards even for trivial errors in record-keeping. The threat of legal action, fears about losing jobs, and peer pressure were enough to undermine a robust debate on my campus, though student activists created as much space as they could. But the university administration was either hostile or mute.

The United States invaded Afghanistan with little domestic or international opposition beyond the small antiwar groups and pacifists. The Bush administration’s weak case for invading Iraq sparked more domestic and international opposition, leading to the world’s largest coordinated day of political protest on February 15, 2003, when millions of people unsuccessfully sought to stop the pending invasion. Soon it was clear that the antiwar movement’s analysis had been sound, as the disastrous consequences of those ill-advised invasions began to be measured in hundreds of thousands of deaths, trillions of dollars, and destabilized societies in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Protected by tenure, I continued teaching at UT until retirement. That was positive for me, but it does not change the fact that my university failed in its obligation to foster the conversation that citizens in a democratic society needed at a crucial moment in history. Throughout that period, I argued not only that I had a right to speak out but that the university had a duty to provide a forum to make use of the expertise of the faculty and engage the community. In debates over going to war, which understandably generate strong emotions, evidence and logic are crucial, and universities have valuable resources to offer. The dominant culture needed, and still needs, to engage the evidence and logic presented by critics of US imperial foreign policy and militarism.

Transgenderism and the failure of the left

For more than a decade, I have offered a critique of the ideology of the transgender movement and what I believe is the failure of liberal/progressive/left people and organizations to engage with radical feminist critiques of patriarchy. I knew the potential consequences when in 2014 I wrote my first article outlining an analysis rooted in the radical feminist perspective on transgenderism, but feminist colleagues had challenged me to get off the sidelines in the debate, and I knew they were right.

Later that year, a local left/anarchist bookstore that I had long supported sent an email blast (without speaking to me first) announcing that it was severing all ties with me. Trans activists came to some of my public lectures on feminist topics to protest or try to shout me down, even though the talks weren’t about transgenderism. Several groups that had invited me to speak about such topics as the ecological crisis withdrew invitations after receiving complaints. And, of course, I can’t know how many people who might have wanted to include me in an activity declined to invite me just to avoid hassles.

No person or organization has an obligation to associate with me, of course. The unfortunate aspect of all this was that none of the organizations or people who shunned or de-platformed me ever explained why my writing was unacceptable, beyond repeating accusations of transphobia. I was denounced for holding views that were asserted to be unacceptable, though no coherent argument to support that denunciation was ever presented to me.

This pattern continued for the remainder of my time at the University of Texas and in Austin, as many friends and faculty colleagues with whom I had worked on a variety of education and organizing projects avoided me. After the 2016 presidential election, I was part of a group that organized a teach-in on the political consequences of Donald Trump’s presidency. By that time, I knew my role should be behind the scenes, to avoid everyone’s work being derailed by an objection to my involvement. I had already received enough criticism to know that if I were one of the speakers, trans activists might protest. So, I handled catering and publicity, out of public view, except that the publicity material included my name and email address. That was enough to generate at least one complaint to the university, from someone who said he wouldn’t feel safe attending, knowing that I was involved in any way.

It turned out that was the last collective education project I was part of, either at UT or with liberal/progressive/left organizations in Austin. When I talked with people about collaborating on education events that in previous years they would have wanted to be involved in, they told me my trans writing made it impossible. More common was silence; faculty colleagues I had worked with in the past simply stopped returning emails or phone messages. I continued to work on projects, either alone or with one trusted friend who shared my analysis, but I was no longer welcome in most left circles.

I also had a number of friends and university colleagues who agreed with my critique, but would acknowledge that position only when speaking privately. These were not shy people who were afraid of public conversation about contentious issues in general. But they had observed the backlash to any challenge to the liberal/progressive/left orthodoxy on transgenderism and wanted to avoid being attacked. I never held that against anyone; we all make strategic decisions about what political battles we want to fight.

The strangest experiences came with a few friends who seemed afraid to talk even privately, always steering conversations away from the subject. In two cases, I never really understood what my friends thought about the issue. Why the hesitancy to discuss something that was so much a part of the public debate about sex/gender justice, which they both cared about deeply, even when talking in private? I can think of two reasons. They may not have trusted me to keep their remarks confidential, but in both cases I had kept confidences before and they had no reason to doubt me. The more plausible explanation is that they didn’t want to consider reasons to challenge the liberal position that was dogma in their institutions. One of them read my 2017 book, The End of Patriarchy, and wrote me to say he thought that the chapter on transgenderism was “a great expansion of your original argument. I just don’t like it, even though it appears to be perfectly logical.” He later told me that he found conversation about the subject “unsettling,” and I honored his request that we not discuss it further.

While these experiences were at times stressful and generally unpleasant, women who have challenged the transgender-industrial complex tend to fare much worse. I never lost a job and have never been physically attacked.  I lost some friends and missed out on organizing efforts to which I think I could have contributed, but I had other friends to rely on and always found a way to continue doing educational programs on campus.

Just as in the 9/11 example, my experience isn’t a story of how my freedom of expression was constrained. No governmental agency shut me down, and the rejection didn’t stop me from writing or speaking out. Many other radical feminists continue to write and speak, as well. But many more people have either muted themselves or been driven out of organizations. It’s hard to imagine how we will deepen our understanding of a subject as complex as transgenderism if people making reasonable arguments that challenge the current liberal dogma are constantly attacked.

One last personal reflection. My biggest frustration is when trans activists tell me that my work is evidence of transphobia. Stonewall, a prominent UK LGBTQ+ organization, defines transphobia as the “fear or dislike of someone based on the fact they are trans, including denying their gender identity or refusing to accept it.”  I do not fear or dislike people who identify as transgender, and I don’t deny their own sense of their identity. Offering an alternative explanation of an experience is not refusing to accept the experience.

This is not merely an academic question for me. As a child, I was short, skinny, effeminate, and late to hit puberty—I was the smallest boy in my class and lived with a constant fear of being targeted by other boys. I also grew up in an abusive household that made impossible any semblance of “normal” development. Until the age of thirty, I had no way to make sense of that experience and assumed I was just an oddball. When I began reading feminism, especially the radical feminist writers whom I found most compelling, I realized that parts of my experience were common in patriarchy. I had suffered in the way many boys in a patriarchal society suffer, and as a man I had sought to escape that suffering by conforming to patriarchal norms of masculinity. Feminism offered a way out of that trap.

I have empathy for people who don’t fit conventional categories and face ridicule or violence for being different, in part because I have experienced those struggles and threats. I have tried to present arguments based on credible evidence and sound logic, but underneath those intellectual positions is my own struggle, pain, and grief, which I think has sensitized me to the struggle, pain, and grief of others. But emotions are by themselves not an argument. Evidence and logic matter. The transgender movement needs to engage the evidence and logic presented by radical feminism.

Lessons learned?

I’m not bitter about these incidents during my teaching career. I will always be grateful that I had a chance to earn a PhD and make a living teaching. The vast majority of my experiences at the University of Texas were not only positive but joyful.

In the classroom, I prided myself on considering all relevant points of view. When lecturing to large classes, I would often make a point on one end of the stage, then walk deliberately to the other side and say, “On the other hand …” I didn’t pretend to be neutral—I had a point of view about which analyses were most compelling—but I worked hard to be fair in the presentation of conflicting views.

I enjoyed engaging with colleagues and students who disagreed and encouraged them to challenge me. As I said often, “Reasonable people can disagree.” I apparently said that so often that at the end of one a semester a student gave me a coffee mug with those words printed on it. I occasionally heard from, or about, a conservative student who disliked my class on political grounds, but that was rare, though of course I can’t know how many students felt that way but never spoke to me about it.

But outside the classroom, I made a conscious choice to advocate for political positions that I knew would be controversial. I never shied away from defending my views, and I had hoped that colleagues would do the same. I made it clear in public that I was speaking as a citizen, not a representative of the university. But I also argued that when I thought I had knowledge acquired as a professor that contributed to public discourse I should share it, precisely because I was an employee of the state of Texas. That strengthens democracy.

I wish that university administrators had made that case to the public after 9/11, instead of pursuing the duck-and-cover strategy they chose. I wish my faculty colleagues would engage challenges to left/liberal dogma, such as in the transgender debate.

As academics today struggle with a hostile culture, it’s important to fight back, to defend the value of higher education. But it’s also wise to reflect on our missteps.

Where do threats to academic freedom come from? Political partisans, of course. But sometimes from the folks running universities and sometimes from faculty colleagues.

[This essay is adapted from It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics]

Robert Jensen is an emeritus professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He collaborates with New Perennials Publishingand the New Perennials Project at Middlebury College. Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu. To join an email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html. Follow him on Twitter: @jensenrobertw