“We’ve Got to do Something to Try to Survive in Here”

Matthew Vernon Whalan

 April 4, 2025

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Image by Wesley Tingey.

“I’ve been sick damn near two weeks. I’ve got a bad cold. I probably have pneumonia, man,” says “Jordan” when I interview him again in late February. The heat and hot water have not been working, and many prisoners are sick.

“This place is so cold, man, ain’t no heat down here in this building, man. And it’s messed up. I’ve been sick, man. That’s probably why I sound so funny today. They ain’t got no heat down here in this damn prison, man, and no hot water. Nothing, man. It gets down to 19, 20 degrees, man,” he says.

He’s “been laying under the blanket for about two, three weeks,” he says, adding, “Man, I’m thinking about building me a fire inside the prison camp. I know I might get wrote up, man. Ever since I got stabbed, man, it’s felt like everything has just been going down hill ever since then. Things have been bad in this prison. This is a messed up prison down here in Union Springs. And then when you go to the chow hall and sit down to eat your food, man, it’s so cold in this prison, you can’t even eat, man. It’s probably 19 degrees in the kitchen, man. It’s freezing around here in Bullock. I’m trembling talking to you, man. I’ve been in the cold all day, man. I went to the doctor. The doctor told me I might have a trace of pneumonia.”

Jordan knows five or six other people with pneumonia in his dorm.

Asked if he’s submitted complaints about the heat, “Man, we all told the warden. I told the head warden. I told the deputy warden. I told the damn lieutenant. I told the captain. I told the sergeant. I told the COs. I told everybody,” he answers, adding that he and other prisoners even asked loved ones in the free world to call about the prison to complain.

Jordan tells me that, years ago, when the heat broke down in Bullock, prisoners were once transferred temporarily to a private prison in Perry County. Much like the plumbing issues and many other problems in the prison and throughout Alabama’s prisons, the problems with the heating system in Bullock are longstanding.

An article in AL.com in 2010 describes the incident Jordan was referring to in that year:

Alabama Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Corbett said 100 of the inmates were transferred to the Montgomery County Jail, and 450 to a private prison in Perry County… The move became necessary after two boilers at the prison broke down over the weekend and a bitter cold wave swept into the state. The sister of one of the prison’s inmates said Monday her brother had told the family that the facility had been lacking heat and hot water for a week, and that heat and hot water had been sporadic for about a month.

A brief report in The News Courier out of Limestone County at the time summed up the cost:

It has cost the Alabama Department of Corrections $132,000 to house inmates elsewhere after boilers at their prison broke down during the state’s cold snap… About 650 inmates are back in the Bullock County Correctional Facility after a boiler breakdown and bitter cold forced the state to move them to two other locations… The Birmingham News reports […] that $108,000 was for housing 450 inmates for eight days in the Perry County Correctional Center… The privately run prison in the Black Belt charged $30 per inmate per day. Two hundred Bullock prisoners were housed for eight days in the Montgomery County Jail at a total cost of $24,000, based on a daily charge of $15 per inmate… There were more than 1,300 inmates at the prison when the boilers broke down, stopping most heat and hot water.

Jordan was one of the prisoners transferred to Perry County Correctional in 2010.

Asked if he believes there is currently any risk of riots in Bullock due to the poor living conditions, lack of heat and hot water, spread of illness and other issues, “There’s a big risk, man. There’s been the fires in [another] dorm. There’s a big risk of riots around here. It might be any day, might break out today, man. They’ve been hyped around here, man, for the last two weeks, man,” he says.

“Them people got fires lit inside of their dorm, man. The drawer where you put your clothes and your stuff in the drawer, on your bunk, them tin, steel boxes, they’re putting fires in there, man. They’re setting fires so smokey that the dorm is about to smoke itself out of here,” he says.

“So, people have already started fires?” I ask.

“Yeah, they’re already doing it,” says Jordan. “They’ve got to stay warm, man. They’ve got to stay warm somehow.”

“In the dorm you’re in?” I ask.

“No, down the hallway,” he says. “They’re talking about doing it in here though. They’re talking about doing it today in here, but the other guys said, ‘Man, don’t do that. When they did that last time, they nearly killed themselves,’ and they wasn’t lying, man. Said, ‘Please don’t do that, man,’ and because they’d open the doors [to get smoke out] and we like to keep to our own damn self.”

He also adds that, “They don’t even call no yard call for us,” reiterating what other prisoners have been telling me over the months. “It’s sad, man. This is a messed up prison. They need to shut this prison down and condemn the kitchen, man. When you go to the chow hall, it smells like a septic tank… There’s a septic tank right up under the kitchen. Man, it stinks so bad around here, and when you eat, when you go to the chow hall, you can taste that smell. That ain’t right, man.”

Previously, prisoners have described how guards are no longer letting them bring bowls of food back to their dorms from the chow hall. Jordan elaborates on that:

“People were taking their bowls to the chow hall and bringing their food back to the dorm, because it smelled so bad down there by that kitchen, but now they’ll start crushing our bowls up… Now we’re taking our garbage bags and tearing the plastic, and putting it in the plastic, and try to stick it down by your privates and try and sneak it out the kitchen, but they’re still catching us doing that, but we’ve got to do something to try to survive in here.”

I believe Jordan has been in Bullock the second longest of any of my sources in that prison.

“Whatever them guys be telling you about this place is true, man,” he says. “It’s for real. Everything is for real, what they’re telling you, man. It’s a messed up place in Alabama. They told us a long time ago, ‘Don’t go to Alabama.’ When they tell you, ‘Don’t go to Alabama,’ don’t come to Alabama. Don’t go to Alabama prison. Please don’t.”

This piece first appeared on Hard Times Reviewer.

Matthew Vernon Whalan is a writer and oral historian living in New England. His work on Alabama prisons and other topics appears weekly on his substack, The Hard Times Reviewer. His work has appeared in Eunoia Review, New York Journal of Books, Counterpunch, Alabama Political Reporter, Jacobin Magazine,The Brattleboro Reformer, Scheer Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Doing Time: American Mass Imprisonment Pandemic. He is a regular contributor on Ben Burgis’ program, Give Them an Argument with Ben Burgis.

Good Governance is an American Value

Stephanie Gasior

 April 4, 2025
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Image by Joel Durkee.

Growing up, my Dad told me the best job I could ever have is working for the government for three clear reasons: stability, benefits, and impact. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this argument wasn’t terribly interesting to a high schooler craving to experience something new and different.

After I graduated college, I joined the Peace Corps and shipped off to a rural, underserved region of Cameroon. Cameroon is a country the size of California located in Central Africa known best at the time for its peacefulness and long-serving President.

In Cameroon, government employees, including teachers, police, health care providers, and governors, are sent to the area of greatest need, often separating them from their families and friends. The motivation of these public servants to serve was sometimes pretty low; I would go to offices and have to wait for hours for meetings.

Worse yet, kids would come to classrooms where their teachers wouldn’t show up for weeks because they left to go visit their families across the country. Rural health care centers often lacked doctors and medications, roads went unpaved, and illegal logging of the rainforest went unchecked.

The lack of committed government employees was felt every single day. In fact, the work I did often took the place of the work government employees could be doing. My Dad’s words came back screaming into my ears on a regular basis; turns out, government jobs do matter and the void left by a lack of employees or programs has a real impact.

In America today, we’re about to learn this lesson about what government means in our lives the hard way. I’ve had the privilege of serving as a civil servant – first at the US Department of Education, and second at the United States Agency for International Development – two agencies that the current Trump Administration has targeted for demolition.

I have been honored to serve my country. Work I have done over the course of my career has ensured that hurricane-ravaged schools in Texas were able to have the funds they needed to serve and help children get back to learning, Angolan children could safely cross the street without fear of injuries and death, and low-income Americans could access a free, quality preschool education.

Without a Department of Education, how will we ensure that all American children have access to a local public school with trained teachers, books, clubs, and special education services? If our children can’t access a local, quality public school, what future will they have?

In Cameroon, I saw how families had to sacrifice to find ways to fund their children’s education. Our children deserve to never have to worry about whether and how they are educated.

The United States Agency for International Development has historically been less well-known but make no mistake; the agency is still important to Americans.

The Agency buys crops from American farmers to distribute globally. It employs more than 10,000 Americans and invests in small and large businesses across the United States, generating tax revenue and economic strength across all 50 States.

The Agency represents the best of our American values, showing our strength and our compassion to folks around the globe while also empowering Americans at home.

President Trump, with the assistance of Elon Musk, has dismantled USAID over the last month. No more aid, no more jobs or investments, no more role modeling our values globally. I may have lost my “stable” government job this week, but I’m more worried that we’re losing our humanity as a country.

What will folks say about Americans now that more children, families, seniors, and disabled persons needlessly suffer both at home and abroad? What a country we are becoming.

We’re at a fork in the road nationally: we can head towards cruelty, or we can live our national values; we can be our worst selves, or we can be our best selves. We still have time to act, but we must first ask ourselves: what does good government mean in our lives and is it worth our time to save it?

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.