Assange’s Eighth Day At Old Bailey: Software Redactions, Iraq Logs And Extradition Act – OpEd

September 18, 2020  Binoy Kampmark 

Julian Assange. Photo Credit: Tasnim News Agency


By Binoy Kampmark

The extradition trial of Julian Assange at the Old Bailey struck similar notes to the previous day’s proceedings: the documentary work and practise of WikiLeaks, the method of redactions, and the legacy of exposing war crimes. In the afternoon, the legal teams returned to well combed themes: testimony on the politicised nature of the Assange prosecution, and the dangers posed by the extra-territorial application of the Extradition Act of 1917 to publishing.

Assange the discerning publisher (for the defence) or reckless discloser (for the prosecution) were recurrent features. This time, it was John Sloboda, co-founder of the British NGO, Iraq Body Count, who took the stand. IBC had its origins in a noble sentiment: to give “dignity to the memory of those killed.” To know how loved ones perished sates a “fundamental human need”, and aids “processes of truth, justice, and reconciliation.” The outfit “maintains the world’s largest public database of violent civilian deaths since the 2003 invasion, as well as a separate running total which includes combatants.”

Central to Sloboda’s testimony was the importance of the Iraq War Logs, released in October 2010. As IBC puts it, the logs did not constitute the first release of US military data on Iraqi casualties but were pioneering, making it “possible to examine such data and to compare and combine it with other sources in a way that adds appreciably to public knowledge.” The compilation of 400,000 Significant Activity reports put together by the US Army comprised, in Sloboda’s words, “the single largest contribution to public knowledge about civilian casualties in Iraq.” They were, he told the court, “a very meticulous record of military patrols in streets in every area of Iraq, noting and documenting what they saw.” Some 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths were duly identified.

In terms of collaboration, IBC approached WikiLeaks in the aftermath of publishing the Afghan War Diary. An invitation from Assange to join a media consortium including The Guardian, Der Spiegel and The New York Times followed. “It was impressed on us from our early encounters with Julian Assange that the aim was a very stringent redaction of documents to ensure that no information damaging to individuals was present.”

The redaction of the logs was part of a “painstaking process” that took “weeks”. Given the physical impossibility of manually redacting 400,000 documents in timely fashion, “The call was out to find a method that would be effective and would not take forever.” Sloboda made mention of a computer program developed by a colleague, one that would remove names from the documents. “It was a process of writing the software, testing it on logs, finding bugs, and running it again until the process was completed.”

The publication release was delayed, as the software in question “was not ready by the original planned publication date”. Modifications were also affected in terms of how thoroughly redaction might take place of “different categories of information”: the removal of architectural features (mosques, for instance), or expertise or professions of individuals.


Pressure was placed on WikiLeaks by the other media partners to publish. Their contribution to the redaction process had been sparse and manual: a mere sampling. Assange held firm against such impatience: redactions had to take place systematically; “the entire database,” recalled Sloboda, was “to be released together.” If anything, the final product was one of overcautious sifting, one overly pruned to prevent any dangers.

For all that, Sloboda insisted in his witness statement that a decade on, the Iraq War Logs “remain the only source of information regarding many thousands of violent civilian deaths in Iraq between 2004 and 2009.” The position of IBC was simple: “civilian casualty data should always be made public.” In doing so, no harm hard occurred to a single individual, despite repeated assertions by the US government to the contrary, not least because of the thorough redaction process. “It could well be argued, therefore, that by making this information public, [Chelsea] Manning and Assange were carrying out a duty on behalf of the victims and the public at large that the US government was failing to carry out.”

Joel Smith QC for the prosecution duly probed Sloboda on his experience in the field of classifying or declassifying documents, and whether he had earned his stripes dealing with corroborating sources in an oppressive regime. Such questioning had a simple purpose: to anathemise the civilian or journalist publisher of documents best left to agents and thumbing bureaucrats. Had Sloboda and staff at the IBC been appropriately vetted? “We paid a visit to the offices of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement with the then director Iain Overton. I don’t remember any vetting process.”

Sloboda, in his written submission, conceded that the previous publications by WikiLeaks, in particular the Afghan War Diary, came with its host of challenges, a “steep learning curve for all of those concerned.” To Smith’s questioning, he revealed that “there was a sense there needed to be a better process in the next round”, the redaction process having not quite been up to scratch.

Another line of the prosecution’s inquiry was the accuracy of the redaction. Was there human agency at any time in reviewing the war logs to avoid any “jigsaw risk” enabling the identification of individuals? Checking did take place, answered Sloboda, “but no human could go through them all.”

Smith, as with other prosecutors, persevered with the Assange as ruthless motif, this time asking if Sloboda was aware of comments allegedly made at the Frontline Club for journalists. The transcript of the event supposedly has the publisher claiming that WikiLeaks nursed no obligation to protect sources in leaked documents except in cases of unjust reprisal. “Today is the first time that I have read the transcript.” Sloboda could “remember nothing like that in our conversations about the Iraq logs.”

The possibility that Iraqi lives were probably put at risk was aired, with Smith reading a witness statement from assistant US attorney Kellen S. Dwyer that the Iraq War Logs had named local Iraqis who had been informants for the US military. (Dwyer’s competence might be gauged by the “cut and paste” mistake he made in revealing that Assange had been charged under seal.) To this unprovable assertion or assessment (qualifying risk and harm), Sloboda expressed surprise; if the reference was to “the heavily redacted logs published in October 2010, this is the first time I have heard of it.”

Human rights attorney and historian Carey Shenkman followed to testify via videolink. Shenkman, a keen student of the historical and often invidious use of the Espionage Act, was in the employ of the late and formidable Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Shenkman’s written testimony is withering of the statute now being used with such relish against Assange.

Much said by Shenkman would be familiar to those even mildly acquainted with that period of executive overreach. It arose from “one of the most politically repressive” times in US history, a nasty product of the Woodrow Wilson administration’s fondness of targeting dissidents. “During World War I, federal prosecutors considered the mere circulation of anti-war materials a violation of the law. Nearly 2,500 individuals were prosecuted under the Act on account of their dissenting opposition to US entry into the war.” Among them were such notables as William “Big Bill” Haywood of the International Workers of the World, film producer Robert Goldstein and, with much disgrace, Eugene Debs, presidential candidate for the Socialist Party.

The word “espionage”, he explained to Judge Vanessa Baraitser, was a misnomer. “Although the law allowed for the prosecution of spies, the conduct it prescribed went well beyond spying.” The Act became the primary “tool for what President Wilson dubbed his administration’s ‘firm hand of stern repression’ against opposition to US participation in the war.”

As Shenkman noted in his statement to the court, the Act targeted spying for foreign enemies in wartime and was intended to address “such matters as US control of arm shipments and its ports”. But it also “reflected the government’s desire to control information and public opinion regarding the war effort.”

Its broadness lies in how it criminalises information: not merely “national security information” but all material falling under the umbrella of “national defence” information. Shenkman has previously argued that public interest defences focused on the positive outcomes of disclosures be given to whistleblowers and hacktivists. But for the First Amendment advocate, the Espionage Act remains fiendishly controversial when it comes to the press, the reason, he testified, why there was never “an indictment of a US publisher under the law for the publication of secrets. Accordingly, there has never been an extraterritorial indictment of a non-US publisher under the Act.”

The idea of prosecuting publishers involving grand juries had been flirted with in some cases, but never seen through. Shenkman offered a few highlights. The Chicago Tribune faced the possibility in 1942 when it published secrets after the Battle of Midway. The effort crumbled when the prosecutor in that case, William Mitchell, expressed doubts that the Espionage Act extended to newspapers. The Truman administration had also tentatively tested these waters, arresting three journalists and three government sources for conspiracy to violate the Act. No indictments followed, though it emerged that political pressure had been brought to bear on the Justice Department from “multiple factions within the Truman administration.” An uproar led to a jettisoning of the case and the imposition of small fines.

Previous examples are also noted in Shenkman’s court submission, including the threatened prosecutions of Seymour Hersh during the Ford administration, and James Bamford in 1981. Dick Cheney, future dark puppeteer of the George W. Bush administration, felt it would be “a public relations disaster” to target Hersh.

According to Shenkman, a chilling change in the winds took place during the Obama administration, if only briefly. Fox News journalist James Rosen had been named as an “aider, abettor, and co-conspirator” in a Justice Department case against Stephen Kim, a State Department employee. The effort stalled and Eric Holder’s remarks on resigning as Attorney General in 2014 spoke of deep regret that Rosen had ever been named. Journalists felt relief.

Then came the Assange indictment. “I never thought based on history we’d see an indictment that looked like this.” It was part of the Trump administration’s desire “to escalate prosecutions as well as ‘jailing journalists who publish classified information.’ The Espionage Act’s breath provides such a means.”

Prosecutor Claire Dobbin was blunter than her colleague, preoccupied with attacking Shenkman’s credibility for having worked with Ratner when representing Assange. Little time was spent on the substance of Shenkman’s submission; instead, the prosecution sought to convince the witness that the case against Assange would be best heard on US soil.

What mattered to Dobbin was taking the politics out of the prosecution. Surely, she put to Shenkman, he could still believe in 2015 that the US would bring charges against Assange. The less than subtle insinuation here is that a refusal to do so under the Obama administration was merely a lull rather than an abandonment of interest. “[O]ftentimes,” replied Shenkman, “these things are left to simmer, but ultimately, an indictment was not brought.” Had President Barack Obama and Attorney General Holder wished to pursue Assange, they would have surely shown a measure of eagerness to do so.

More could be said about the politicisation thesis: the singular use of the Espionage Act, the framing of the charges, and the timing of the indictment, all pointing to “a highly politicized prosecution.”

Prosecutorial tactics switched to hair splitting. What constituted the stealing of national security and national defence information? Would that be covered by the First Amendment? Depends, countered Shenkman, reminding Dobbin of the recent 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision in United States v Moalin accepting the merit of Edward Snowden’s disclosures on unwarranted surveillance by the National Security Agency, despite deriving from an instance of theft.

There was a divergence of views on the issue of “hacking” as well. “Are you saying that hacking government databases is protected under the First Amendment?” shot Dobbin. Again, more clarity was needed, suggested Shenkman. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, for instance, makes no reference to the term. Nuance is required: “crack a password’ and “hack a computer” have “scary” connotations; in other instances there would be “ways the First Amendment could be relevant.”

Given such disagreement and lack of clarity of terms, Dobbin pushed Shenkman to agree that a US court would be the most appropriate body to determine the issue. “No,” came the emphatic answer. The way the indictment had been drafted was political. The prosecution had, effectively, dithered.

Home » Assange’s Eighth Day At Old Bailey: Software Redactions, Iraq Logs And Extradition Act – OpEd

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

 He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Democracy Now | Julian Assange, and Press Freedom, on Trial in London

By AMY GOODMAN and DENIS MOYNIHAN |
September 19, 2020 

The role of the free press is to hold power accountable, especially those who would wage war. Press freedom itself is currently on trial in London, as Julian Assange, founder and editor-in-chief of the whistleblower website Wikileaks, fights extradition to the United States over an ever-evolving array of espionage and hacking charges. If extradited, Assange faces almost certain conviction followed by up to 175 years in prison. His unjust imprisonment would also shackle journalists worldwide, serving as a stark example to anyone daring to publish leaked information critical of the U.S. government.

U.S. prosecutors allege that Assange conspired with Chelsea Manning, a Private in the U.S. Army, to illegally download hundreds of thousands of war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan, along with a huge trove of classified cables from the U.S. State Department.

The first disclosure from this massive whistleblower release was a video that Wikileaks called “Collateral Murder.” It was recorded aboard a U.S. Apache helicopter gunship as it patrolled the skies above Baghdad on July 12, 2007. The Apache crew recorded video and audio of their slaughter of a dozen men on the ground below, including a Reuters cameraman, Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40. After the initial high-calibre machine gun attack, a van arrived to help the wounded. The Apache crew received permission to “engage” the van and opened fire, tearing apart the front of the vehicle, injuring two children in the van. Reuters had unsuccessfully sought the video for years.

Before long, The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel had worked together with Wikileaks and Assange, publishing stories based on the disclosures. They detailed war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, torture at CIA blacksites, abuses at the U.S.’s notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp, and cynical diplomatic dealings by State Department officials.

“It is a clear press freedom case,” Jennifer Robinson, one of Julian Assange’s attorneys, said recently on the Democracy Now! news hour. “The First Amendment is understood to protect the media in receiving and publishing that information in the public interest, which is exactly what WikiLeaks did.”

The British authorities have kept Assange in almost complete isolation in London’s high security Belmarsh prison since arresting him in April, 2019, dragging him out of the Ecuadorian embassy. Granted political asylum by Ecuador, he lived inside the dark, cramped embassy for over seven years. When a rightwing president took power in Ecuador, he revoked Assange’s asylum and allowed the arrest.

Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, visited Assange in Belmarsh, and reported afterwards, “I spoke with him for an hour…then we had a physical examination for an hour by our forensic expert, and then we had the two-hour psychiatric examination.

And all three…came to the conclusion, that he showed all the symptoms that are typical for a person that has been exposed to psychological torture over an extended period of time.”

The conditions of Assange’s imprisonment have only worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. He hasn’t spoken publicly in court, other than once, shouting “Nonsense!” in response to one of the many unsupported claims by the U.S. prosecutor. The presiding magistrate threatened to have Assange removed. Experts have lined up to defend Assange, including legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

In 1971, Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the United States’ war in Vietnam, documenting how successive administrations had lied to the public about the war. Like Assange, he provided the leaked documents to the New York Times. Also like Assange, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act, and could have spent life behind bars.

Ultimately, a judge threw out his case, when it was revealed that President Nixon had ordered criminal break-ins seeking derogatory information on Ellsberg.

In a prepared statement in Assange’s defense, Ellsberg reflected on the importance of the Wikileaks disclosures. “I consider them to be amongst the most important truthful revelations of hidden criminal state behavior that have been made public in U.S. history,” he said. “The American public needed urgently to know what was being done routinely in their name, and there was no other way for them to learn it than by unauthorized disclosure.”

Many of the war crimes exposed by Wikileaks, in cooperation with established news organizations around the world, occurred under President George W. Bush. Assange’s prosecution began under President Barack Obama. Then-Vice President Joe Biden called Assange a “high-tech terrorist.” Now, President Trump, who said during his 2016 campaign, “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,” wants to lock up Assange and throw away the key. No president, of any party, should be allowed to threaten the free press. Indeed, it is essential to the functioning of a democratic society.

MABON

 

EU climate plan leak suggests a 55% emissions cut by 2030, but MEPs want 60%

By Greg Lory, Joanna Gill • last updated: 14/09/2020 EURONEWS

In this Nov. 6, 2017 file photo cars and trucks queue on the highway A5 in Frankfurt, Germany. - Copyright Michael Probst/AP

The EU is looking to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030. The new green goal set to be announced by the Commission President this Wednesday during her first State of the Union speech.

The current objective of the European Union is to reduce them by 40% in the next ten years.

Several leaks confirmed the rumours circulating in Brussels of a 15% increase, but it is far from a done deal.

Each institution has its own position on the new climate law. The head of the European Parliament's environment committee, French MEP Pascal Canfin, wants to go further and see greenhouse gas emissions cut by 60% compared to the levels reached in 1990.

He argues that the 40% is not enough, and is not in alignment with the Paris climate accord, and not enough to deal with the current consequences of climate change.

"This is why we raised this target to minus 60% as part of the vote by the environment committee," he adds.

But this ambition is not shared by everyone in the European Parliament. The Conservatives group, ECR, believes that such an objective could undermine jobs, investment and innovation.

The climate law is the focus of political battles due to it being at the heart of the European Green Deal.

It will define the Union's climate objectives for decades to come. The news that the Commission wants to further cut back on emissions is evidence that it wants to keep its environmental ambitions on track. But it could still be changed

How the EU is trying to make one hundred cities carbon neutral by 2030
In partnership withThe European Commission

Cities cover about 3% of land on Earth but produce about 72% of global greenhouse gas emissions. - Copyright euronews

By Claudio Rosmino • last updated: 11/09/2020


The EU has a goal - to make one hundred cities carbon neutral by 2030 as part of its Horizon Europe program that will be launched next year.

In this week's special edition of Futuris on Euronews, we look at what is being done to reach that target.
BUILDING A GREENER FUTURE

Sustainable development of urban areas is a challenge of key importance to keep carbon emissions down.

It requires new, efficient, and user-friendly technologies and services, in particular in the areas of energy, transport and ICT. However, these solutions need integrated approaches, both in terms of research and development of advanced technological solutions, as well as deployment.

Valladolid is one of the 'lighthouse' cities that has been chosen to experiment with innovations and lead the way for other cities to replicate what works.

The new ideas are being implemented within the framework of the EU project Remourban, which brings together various initiatives.



Miguel Angel Garcia-Fuentes is a project coordinator for Remourban and talked us through some of the things being done.

"We have implemented actions in many areas, like making buildings more energy efficient, creating sustainable mobility, and implemented information and communication technologies. In terms of mobility, we have a charging infrastructure that has sixty-three charging points around the city.

"We have also added forty five electric vehicles to various last-mile delivery fleets within the city, plus two electric buses, and another three additional ones that the city council has incorporated," he added.


MAKING CITIES 'CLIMATE NEUTRAL'

Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, who is chair of the climate-neutral and smart cities mission, explained why the project to make cities smart and carbon neutral is so important.

"Cities cover about 3% of Earth and they produce about 72% of global greenhouse gas emissions. So the cities are exactly the place where we can make an impact and influence changing the climate to make it neutral. Because mobility, housing, waste, these are all issues which can be tackled by reducing the emission of the gas.

"Our goal is mainly to support, to promote, and to showcase one hundred cities in Europe, and help them in the transformation process towards climate neutrality," she added.


CREATING 'SMART CITIES'

The transformation of a city into 'a smart model' takes into account several factors, but energy is the key one, as Rubén Garcia, MySmartLife project coordinator, explained.

"The goal of these projects is about working on the sustainability and the resilience of the cities. Our cities are obviously a very large energy consumer. Most of us live in cities and here we have problems when it comes to supplying clean energy. What they are promoting in this kind of project is the development of very innovative pioneer programs towards this energy transition."

The municipality of Palencia has now replaced 57% of its total street lighting network with LED technology.

Building and sharing these sort of interconnected sustainable projects pave the way for future urban strategies.

Mario Simon Martin, mayor of Palencia, backs the project.

"We now have an obligation to start visualising the city to be the way we want it in 2030. A city where all these projects will be completed, and a city that continues to work to b a friendly city, where the quality of life is being improved," he added.

Pursuing National Liberation and Socialism: 

A Conversation with Oscar Figuera

by CIRA PASCUAL MARQUINA

Oscar Figuera is the general secretary of the Venezuelan Communist Party [PCV]. As a 17-year-old metal worker in Aragua state, he cut his teeth as a union organizer in the Venezuelan Worker’s Unitary Central [CUTV, the PCV-led union federation], becoming the union’s general secretary in 1986. Today, Figuera is a member of the National Assembly [2016-2020 term]. In this exclusive interview, Figuera talks to VA about both the recent transformations of Venezuelan capitalism and the Popular Revolutionary Alternative, a broad coalition that aims to regroup leftwing Chavista forces in a front that is independent from the PSUV.

In 2018 the PCV, the [Homeland For All party] PPT, and all other parties of the Great Patriotic Pole [GPP] supported Nicolas Maduro’s presidential campaign. However, in recent months the PCV, the PPT, and other political organizations joined forces to create the Popular Revolutionary Alternative [APR]. This electoral coalition will present independent candidates for the December 6 parliamentary elections. What has changed in Venezuelan politics since 2018 and what can you tell us about the APR?

First, I should say that the APR is not an electoral initiative, although in its current configuration it is triggered by the upcoming elections. This is a project with a strategic projection that must reach beyond the electoral process. For us, the electoral process is a tactical opportunity to regroup forces, revolutionary currents, and other expressions of grassroots Chavismo. It’s about building a space for the joint construction of a popular agenda.

In fact, the APR is an outgrowth of prior coalitions such as the Popular Revolutionary Bloc [Bloque Popular Revolucionario] and the Patriotic Anti-imperialist Alliance [Alianza Patriotica Anti-imperialista]. The objective of the APR and its precursors is bringing together the working-class, campesino, and communard forces in a revolutionary way.

In other words, our strategic objective is not the December 6 elections, but regrouping the popular revolutionary currents that identify themselves with Chavez’s most advanced proposals.

We have been careful in our way of proceeding because we see imperialism as the main enemy of the Venezuelan people, and that is why we supported Maduro’s 2018 presidential bid. But the truth is that, beyond the capitalist crisis, the exhaustion of the Venezuelan dependent rentier model [of economic development], and the impact of the imperialist siege, there is plenty of evidence pointing to a real political shift in the project of the governing forces [in Venezuela].

Chavez’s death was a tremendous blow to the Bolivarian Process. In fact, it affected the whole continent – and I would say the globe – but obviously the biggest and hardest impact was on the Venezuelan project.

The progressive processes that came to power in Latin America over the last couple of decades were reformist and social-democratic in character. The processes had a low ceiling, and when they reached it, they began to slide back. Nonetheless, Chavez’s discourse gave the Bolivarian Process some elements that set it apart from the other processes [ín the continent].

Why? Because Chavez, despite socialism not being built, was convinced that socialism was the path. Today, Chavista politicians talk about socialism in a rote way, but they are not committed to it. Government officials disassociate discourse and practice: they talk about socialism and national liberation, but in real terms the political and economic policies have a liberal bourgeois character.

So, at the end of the day, the class character of the current government differs from that of Chavez’s government.

Our confrontation with the government is not personal. We have no problem with the government’s representatives, taken one at a time… In fact, those who fall into a personalist approach to politics hurt the popular movement by erasing the class character of the confrontation.

Class contradictions, which express themselves in the political and ideological projects, have become more acute. That is why, on the one hand, the PCV calls for a process of demarcation, regrouping, and confrontation when it comes to Venezuela’s internal issues. On the other hand, we call for maintaining unity on the anti-imperialist front.

Yes, and this connects to your previous question. The fracture is not new. Here I will speak on behalf of the PCV. One of the first important differences that we had with the government in its current incarnation is that it considers socialism a matter of speech: it’s not about doing, it’s about saying. This is not a new issue.

In our party’s XV Congress [2017] we decided that, in order to advance, we had to confront the government, define our separate objectives, and accumulate strength. Why did we formulate this orientation? Because we believe that the Venezuelan political project is moving backward, that the strategic project of national liberation and building up to advance towards socialism is broken. We are retreating, and that is only useful for the recomposition of capital.

After that congress, during the 2018 presidential campaign, we had a very heated debate about whether our party should support Nicolas Maduro’s candidacy. Concerns ranged from the government’s economic, labor, and social policies to the existence of rampant corruption and bureaucratism. Further issues were the curtailing of participative and protagonistic democracy as well as the state (and semi-state) control mechanisms that had been put in place to limit the scope of popular organization, or sometimes even liquidate it.

After two days of intense debate, the Communist Party came to the decision that we would support Maduro’s presidential candidacy only if a binding agreement was signed. The binding agreement committed the government to opposing monopolies, reinstating labor rights, and reversing the agrarian policies underway, among other things. In other words, we drafted a document that pointed the way to national liberation, always with socialism as the [ultimate] goal. On February 28, 2018, Nicolas Maduro signed that agreement.

Yet, the government rapidly broke the deal after Maduro’s election. It did so by continuing to implement liberal economic policies and through anti-democratic practices. In the current electoral context, this left us with two options: continuing to endorse a strategic project that goes against the interests of the masses, our principles, and Chavez’s own project; or we could build a popular alternative. We opted for the second possibility.

That is where the APR comes from. It is committed to national liberation and socialism while confronting tame reformism, fascism, and imperialism.

On August 17 the PCV, the PPT, and other organizations officially launched the APR in a press conference, telling the nation that the APR would have one single, independent electoral list for the National Assembly elections. Four days later, Venezuela’s Supreme Court intervened the PPT, the second largest force in the APR, imposing an ad hoc leadership that was willing to participate in an electoral coalition with the PSUV. What can we make of all this?

The Supreme Court meddling in the internal affairs of the PPT is an expression of the class struggle underway. Venezuela is a capitalist country and, as a consequence, the state has a bourgeois character. Furthermore, in the last few years, there has been a change: a new bourgeois nucleus has emerged within the government or in a tight relationship with it. We are talking about a new sector of the bourgeoisie, which employs a socialist discourse, but needs the bourgeois state to continue if it is to maintain its newly-acquired wealth and social privileges.

Many people who got to power with Chavez in ‘98, most of them from middle-class sectors, have joined this bourgeoisie. Their class condition has changed and, in the process, their conscience has shifted. We find the roots of this in the fact that a truly revolutionary organization, capable of directing the Bolivarian Process, did not emerge.

Among the forces in the government, the Supreme Court expresses the interests of those who exercise power now, both political and economic. To retain its [economic] privileges, the enriched sector needs a united electoral ticket, even if that means taking control, through judicial intervention, of a Chavista party like the PPT.

Nonetheless, the APR will go forward, both as a long-term joint project and as an electoral front for the December elections. Of course, the newly-configured PPT will endorse the candidatures imposed by the PSUV, but the APR will present its bid for the National Assembly composed of [the core of the] PPT, the PCV, and all the grassroots, communard, and Chavista organizations that have joined forces.

In the APR, there are no bosses. We are building a common space. As it turns out, only the PCV has a viable ballot [due to the TSJ’s intervention of the PPT], but the candidates that will appear on our ballot represent an alliance with forces that have a revolutionary perspective and share strategic objectives.

In other words, little has changed in the APR since the Supreme Court intervened in the PPT: there is still the collective appreciation that the Bolivarian Process needs to correct its course. The government’s liberal turn is not going to resolve the crisis that affects the destitute masses. Our collective belief is that the APR must express the interests of the dispossessed sectors in these elections and beyond.

You talk about the government’s “liberal turn.” Could you be more precise?

The PSUV – not its bases, but its direction – is rapidly advancing towards the liberalization of the economy in order to guarantee the recomposition of capitalism. This means that privatizations are in vogue, collective bargaining eliminated, and workers’ rights to organize curtailed, while the minimum salary remains under US $2 a month. Meanwhile campesinos – whose right to vacant lands was recognized by Chavez – are violently displaced and the land given to new and old terratenientes [large landowners].

We also see a tendency toward the judicialization of struggles. Campesinos, communards, and workers are put behind bars, while corrupt officials are free and fascists are granted presidential pardons. The case of PDVSA workers Aryenis Torrealba and Alfredo Chirinos is emblematic: they were arrested more than six months ago under bogus charges. Their real crime? They were denouncing important corruption schemes in PDVSA. To this day they remain jailed with no due process.

What is the goal of the electoral struggle at this time? Is the idea to pressure the government? To build a left opposition?

In the Bolivarian Process, elections became the main form of struggle and for the time being, this remains so. The way in which class struggle develops will determine if other forms of struggle emerge.

For us, the December elections are also a tactical moment in the process of regrouping and accumulation of forces. Additionally, elections are a space for ideological struggle. This is all the more important at a time when large swaths of the population are willing to listen. Of course, there are sectarian groups that shut themselves from debate, but there undoubtedly exists a thirst for a popular alternative within Chavismo.

Elections are a space to promote the ideological debate, present proposals, and contrast the programs of each organization. Elections are useful to bring together and recompose forces, and that is precisely what the APR is looking to do. Finally, the National Assembly is also a tribune to defend the interests of the Venezuelan pueblo in the face of liberal reformism in power while denouncing the imperialist aggression.

It is no secret that there are large cracks or rifts within the Bolivarian Process. Without personalizing the matter, who is responsible for the rifts between the Bolivarian government and a wide swath of the popular movement, which includes the PCV?

Let’s go from the general to the particular. The roots of the rupture can be found in the growing class contradictions inside the Bolivarian Process, which widen as the crisis of the dependent, rentier capitalism here pushes more and more of the population into frankly catastrophic conditions.

This is precisely why we don’t personalize the situation. It’s not about X or Y doing this or that. It’s about the class interests within an organization. Each class fraction has a political expression, and those political expressions confront each other. Personalizing these issues hides the essence of the contradiction.

At the end of the day, we don’t know what will happen, but it will be decided by the correlation of forces within the class struggle.

Today, it is common to say that in Venezuela we need unity, using a “fortress under siege” analogy, because of the real danger that US imperialism poses to Venezuela’s sovereignty. How do the APR and the PCV understand unity in this difficult situation?

I’ll talk about the PCV’s conception, since the APR is still under construction and there are ongoing debates.

The PCV understands unity on two levels. On the one hand, there must be an ample anti-imperialist and antifascist alliance, and we understand that that should be the role of the Great Patriotic Pole [GPP]. Instead of attempting to liquidate other patriotic forces, the GPP should be a space for the collective preservation of our sovereignty. Differences at the national level shouldn’t be cause for liquidation. In fact, the GPP has great potential to forge a wide anti-imperialist and antifascist alliance.

On the other hand, there is the need to build a revolutionary unity on the basis of the class interests of the working class, of campesinos, communards, and other popular sectors. Building this kind of unity is urgent so that revolutionary organizations don’t become an appendix of tame reformism.

We have to come together in the context of the anti-imperialist struggle while, at a national level, we must confront the tendencies that want to liberalize the economy.

The APR is precisely the space for building the revolutionary unity of the working class, campesinos, communards, and popular masses, which should also incorporate revolutionary intellectuals and honest sectors of the armed forces.

SOURCE:  https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14994

Cira Pascual Marquina is a teacher and political organizer in Caracas, and a writer for for Venezuelanalysis.com.

Nature, Science and Revolutionary Struggle

by LOUIS PROYECT COUNTERPUNCH

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Working my way through John Bellamy Foster’s magisterial “The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology,” it dawned on me that there was a gap in my knowledge. I knew that Marx and Engels were consumed with ecological problems, even though the word wasn’t in their vocabulary. To a large extent, my awareness came from reading another great Foster book, “Marx’s Ecology.” However, I couldn’t help shake the feeling that in between Marx/ Engels and Rachel Carson it was mostly a blur. The failure of the socialist states to support Green values reinforced that feeling. From Chernobyl to the shrinking of the Aral Sea, there was not much to distinguish capitalist and socialist society.

After finishing “The Return of Nature,” that blur gave way to clarity. Foster’s intellectual history shows a chain of thinkers connecting Marx/Engels to today’s greatest ecological thinkers, from Rachel Carson to Barry Commoner. To use a cliché, they stood on the shoulders of giants.

On page 386, we learn that Rachel Carson applied lessons she learned from the Haldane-Oparin to life’s origin. I knew J.B.S. Haldane was a British Marxist scientist but had no clue how important he was to Carson and the ecosocialist movement of today. As for Alexander Oparin, he was a Soviet biochemist who wrote “The Origin of Life.” As for the Haldane-Oparin theory, it explained for the first time how life could have originated out of inorganic matter and why such a process was a singularity. Carson stressed the importance of the theory for her work and for anybody else trying to develop a holistic understanding of the connection between humanity and nature:

From all this we may generalize that, since the beginning of biological time, there has been the closest possible interdependence between the physical environment and the life it sustains. The conditions on the young earth produced life; life then at once modified the conditions of the earth, so that this single extraordinary act of spontaneous generation could not be repeated. In one form or another, action and interaction between life and its surroundings has been going on ever since. (From “Lost Woods”)

In a necessary but controversial leitmotif that appears throughout the book, Foster speaks of the need to apply a dialectical materialist approach to organic life, including homo sapiens in its social aspects. For decades now, dialectical materialism has been a dirty word in Marxism. Engels was supposedly responsible for creating a false philosophy that incorporated the worst, mechanical tendencies in Marxism. Later on, dialectical materialism became a kind of approved quasi-theology in Stalin’s Russia that spread throughout the world. To counteract its influence, Marxist scholars stressed their adherence to historical materialism that bracketed out most of the natural world except when it became an 800-pound gorilla such today when climate change becomes as important a factor as unemployment.

For Marxism to respond adequately to the threat of a Sixth Extinction, dialectical materialism is essential since the growing threats to the natural world threaten the social world. Engels understood this entirely, as indicated by his “The Part played by
Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.” He wrote, “When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons.” This single sentence encapsulates the thinking of ecologists ever since.

Engels’s essay was part of “The Dialectics of Nature,” a work that is fundamental to Foster’s thesis. In J.B.S. Haldane’s preface to the 1939 edition, he spoke of its laying “particular emphasis on the inter-connection of all processes, and the artificial character of the distinctions which men have drawn, not merely between vertebrates and invertebrates or liquids and gases, but between the different fields of human knowledge such as economics, history, and natural science.” While the book remains relatively obscure within the Marxist corpus, Foster understood the need to place it much closer to the center. It represents Engels’s attempt to synthesize Hegelian dialectics with modern science, especially Darwin’s theories that both Marx and Engels saw as reinforcing their own ideas about social evolution. By separating dialectics from its Hegelian idealist trappings, the methodology helps us understand the natural world.

For both Marx and Engels, the role of nature came into play because the diseases that were ravaging Europe at the time were largely a product of capitalism’s wrenching human beings from their natural, rural existence. As part of primitive accumulation, capitalism dragged farmers into the great industrial slums that bred cholera and other killer diseases, just as it does today.

Among their contemporaries, no other physician was more attuned to the needs of the working class living in unhealthy conditions than Edward Lankester, a friend of the Darwin’s. He led investigations of London’s waters and concluded that organic material was responsible for cholera. He was also a strong supporter of the North in the U.S. Civil War, poor people’s right to a vote, and Irish freedom. In the last decades of his life he devoted himself to public health and working class conditions.

Like Marx, Lankester read soil chemist Justus von Liebig and concluded that the separation of human beings from nature led to soil infertility and the miserable conditions that bred disease in England’s manufacturing centers.

Committed as he was to Darwin’s theories, Lankester encouraged his sons to follow in his footsteps. His son Ray became a zoologist and the Marx’s close friend. In his studies of the natural world, he developed an outlook strikingly similar to what Engels wrote about the alps. In a 1913 article titled “The Effacement of Nature by Man,” he referred to the same kind of despoliation that continues today. “Very few people have any idea of the extent to which man . . . has actively modified the face of Nature, the vast herds of animals he has destroyed, the forests he has burnt up, the deserts he has produced, and the rivers he has polluted.” In North America, the settlers had nearly exterminated, while “Progressive money-making man” of the mining and manufacturing world destroyed trout streams. In his own country, “the Thames mud was blood-red (really ‘blood-red,’ since the colour was due to the same blood-crystals which colour our own blood) with the swarms of a delicate little worms like the earth-worm, which has an exceptional power of living in foul water and nourishing itself upon putrid mud.”

When Lankester wrote these words, he was not an outlier. By 1913, socialism’s popularity was widespread in Britain, even from a Fabian perspective. It did not take reading Marx or Engels to understand that the Thames was an open sewer.

Two non-Marxists became outspoken critics of the environmental devastation. H.G. Wells, best-known for his science fiction sagas, was deeply concerned that the dystopia of “The Time Machine” might be England’s fate if it did not reverse industry’s assault on nature. The other was Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist who unfortunately shared Trotsky’s belief that eugenics could help “improve” the human stock. Notwithstanding this flaw, which was endemic in progressive circles in the early 1900s, Huxley’s ecological critique was ahead of his time. It was no accident that both Wells and Huxley were students of Ray Lankester.

In 1929, Wells, his son G. P. Wells, a biology instructor, and Huxley co-authored a 1,400 page book titled “The Science of Life” that warned humanity about theirunless capitalist despoliation of the environment came to an end. They anticipated the current-day warnings about a Sixth Extinction made by scientists today. So dire are the symptoms of collapse today that scientists need no prodding from the left. This excerpt from “The Science of Life” expresses their concerns:

When man comes on the scene, matters are altered. He crowds the country with animals. He hurries up their growth and increases the demands they make on the soil. A modern cow gives about a thousand gallons of milk at one lactation period, and produces her first calf at about three years; the native cattle of Africa do not breed till they are six, and yield at most three hundred gallons of milk at one lactation. And too often he ships off the meat, bone-meal, cheese leather, and wool without putting anything back in the soil. He forgets that all their mineral ingredients have come out of the soil. A country that is exporting grassland products is also exporting grassland fertility. There are large areas which are naturally deficient in minerals; but man has been creating mineral-deficiency over other and vaster areas.

Despite its dismal environmental record (or perhaps because of it), England remained the vanguard of ecological thought. In 1931, England’s scientific world met with Nikolai Bukharin, a vanguard figure of the Russian revolution. Unlike Leon Trotsky, whose ecomodernism led him to embrace atomic power in 1926 and “enlightened” eugenics in 1934, Bukharin applied dialectical materialism to both the natural and social world.

In 1921, he wrote “Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology” to help develop a social science that could contend with that of the bourgeoisie. The work is startling for its grasp of the kind of environmental threats the U.N. warned about in a highly publicized report released to the public on May 6th. Bukharin wrote:

The world being in constant motion, we must consider phenomena in their mutual relations, and not as isolated cases. All portions of the universe are actually related to each other and exert an influence on each other. The slightest motion, the slightest alteration in one place, simultaneously changes everything else. The change may be great or small – that is another matter – at any rate, there is a change. For example: let us say the Volga forests have been cut down by men. The result is that less water is retained by the soil, with a resulting partial change in climate; the Volga “runs dry,” navigation on its waters becomes more difficult, making necessary the use, and therefore the production, of dredging machinery; more persons are employed in the manufacture of such machinery; on the other hand, the animals formerly living in the forests disappear; new animals, formerly not dwelling in these regions, put in their appearance; the former animals have either died out or migrated to forest areas, etc.; and we may go even further: with a change in climate, it is clear that the condition of the entire planet has been changed, and therefore an alteration in the Volga climate to a certain extent changes the universal climate. Further, if the map of the world is changed to the slightest extent, this involves also a change – we must even suppose – in the relations between the earth and the moon or sun, etc., etc.

In 1931, the British scientific left convened the Second International Conference on the History of Science and Technology held in London in 1931. Bukharin brought along a Soviet delegation of eight scientists that included the USSR’s best-known physicist, A. F. Joffe, and best-known biologist/geneticist, N. I. Vavilov. Vavilov gave a rousing speech on the Soviet discovery of germplasm for major cultivated plants. Soviet scientists searched for the earliest agricultural cultivation, based on the theory that this would identify the areas with the greatest genetic diversity.

Bukharin’s delivered a paper titled “Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism” that had little to with Stalinist dogma. It began with the statement that “The crisis of present-day capitalist economy has produced a most profound crisis in the whole of capitalist culture; a crisis in individual branches of science, a crisis in epistemology, a crisis in world outlook, a crisis in world feeling.” This crisis continues to this day.

However, the biggest impact on the British left during the conference came from the physicist Boris Hessen who delivered a paper titled “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s ‘Principia’” that placed Newton’s discoveries within the context of the socio-economic backdrop of 17^th and 18^th century Britain. Hessen’s paper became a major influence on the thinking of three of the great scientists of the left attending the conference: J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal, and Joseph Needham. They all had ties to the Communist Party but never to the point of allowing Soviet dogma to derail their work.

In one of the more fascinating passages in “The Return of Nature,” Foster reviews the cold war climate that ostracized the British scientists who dared to identify with the USSR. As was the case with the CIA intervening in the literature and art world to discredit the admittedly stultifying character of Soviet culture, anti-Communists took aim at the British leftist scientists, especially their opposition to nuclear war.

A campaign against “Bernalism” began long before the Cold War. In the fall of 1940, John R. Baker, an Oxford zoologist, eugenicist, and virulent anti-Communist, wrote a letter to forty-nine prominent British warning about Bernalism. Two of the scientists aroused by the letter formed a triumvirate with Baker against the Marxists. One was Baker’s Oxford colleague, the ecologist Arthur Tansley. The other was the chemist Michael Polanyi, Karl Polanyi’s brother. In 1941, they founded a group called the Society for Freedom in Science (SFS) that referred to their opponents as “gangsters” and argued against planning in science and condemned the Soviet Union.

After WWII ended, the three escalated their attack, no doubt fired up by Winston Churchill’s bellicose Iron Curtain speech. Baker and Polanyi were the hard-core anti-Communists, while Tansley was a rightwing social democrat. In a letter to a colleague during the war, Baker wrote, ““I do not at all appreciate our alliance with the USSR. I should have preferred to have nothing to do with her, whatever the consequences. The regime seems to me more evil . . . than . . . [Hitler’s] Germany.”

Baker and Polanyi were followers of Hayek’s economics. It was a mutual admiration society with Hayek inviting Polanyi to the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society’s founding meeting in Switzerland. In 1950, In 1950, rightwing intellectuals founded the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The CIA used the Rockefeller Foundation as cover to provide funding for the CCF, which in turn dispensed funding to allied groups, including the SFS.

Hayek, Polanyi, and Baker were all directly involved with the CCF, with Polanyi playing a leading role throughout. He was president of the organizing committee for a 1953 CCF meeting in Hamburg, under the theme of Science and Freedom. This first large meeting of the CCF drew120 scholars and scientists, along with professional anti-Communists such as French philosopher Raymond Aron and ex-Marxist Sidney Hook.

In their ongoing crusade against the British scientific left, they anticipated the “science wars” of the 1980s and 90s that pitted scientists such as Paul Gross and Norman Levitt against men and women they dismissed as “relativists”. They wrote a book titled “Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science” that helped shape the agenda of a conference at NYU on the “science wars” funded by the Olin Foundation. Levitt got the ear of an NYU physics professor who wrote a postmodernist spoof for Social Text, a journal that included it as part of a special issue on the “science wars.”

Many people on the left, including me, cheered for Sokal because we hated postmodernist obfuscation. However, I eventually learned that the Social Text issue hardly conformed to Sokal’s stereotype. It contained an article by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins that defended the kind of analysis the British scientific left pioneered and that eventually led to the formation of the New Left Science for the People. In his Epilogue, Foster pays tribute to Lewontin, Levins, and Science for the People’s legacy. Let me conclude with Foster’s call for a renewed spirit of ecosocialist theory and activism:

As an organization, Science for the People was known for the intellectual stars with which it was associated, including such giants in their fields as Rita Arditti, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Stephen Jay Gould, Ruth Hubbard, Richard Levins, and Richard Lewontin. In particular, Levins, Lewontin, and Gould, all of whom took up positions at Harvard, then the leading center for evolutionary biology, were to become known for the creative ways in which they drew on the dialectical, historical, and materialist views of Marxism (as well as other influences such as Darwinism) to develop their evolutionary and ecological critiques. In many ways, this constituted a further iteration, but in startlingly new ways, of the dialectic of nature and society, symbolized by the Marx-Darwin relation, that had so engaged Engels and the British Marxist scientists of the 1930s. It manifested itself practically in strong research-based repudiations of crude mechanism, idealism (teleology), and racialism in science, along with exposing the inherent misuse of science in a capitalist society.

As part of the mass movement against capitalist barbarism today, scientists of the left will respond in the same way that earlier generations did. Given the anti-scientific miasma deepening each day in Washington, they can’t remain in an ivory tower. We should never forget that in addition to being a blow against war and feudal privileges, the Russian Revolution was an attempt to build a society based on scientific principles. No amount of idealism could overcome the obstacles placed in the path of Lenin, Bukharin, Trotsky and other revolutionaries. Today, a revolution in a country like the USA will not have to worry about 21 invading counter-revolutionary armies. For the first time in human history, the construction of a socialist society will be feasible. I urge you to read John Bellamy Foster’s “The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology” as an essential guide to how earlier generations saw such a task.

Louis Proyect blogs at Louisproyect.org and is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list. In his spare time, he reviews films for CounterPunch.

Review of ‘Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution’ by Don Fitz

by STAN COX COUNTERPUNCH

Don Fitz’s new book Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution was going to press at Monthly Review in early spring, as the pandemic was ramping up, so he had just barely enough time to slip in a postscript teasingly titled, “How Che Guevara Taught Cuba to Confront COVID-19.” The postscript puts an exclamation mark on the medical history of Cuba that Fitz takes us through in the 240 compelling pages that come before. Based on that history, one would have expected Cuba to take early, decisive actions to stem the pandemic, and Fitz says that’s exactly what happened.

The government quickly converted school-uniform factories to manufacture medical masks. They sacrificed their crucial tourism industry in order to bar all non-resident travel. They locked down hotspots, ensuring that their residents were well provisioned and that medically vulnerable people were checked frequently. They did plenty of testing and contact tracing. Medical students walked through all neighborhoods regularly, checking in on residents. All of this, Fitz writes, was no more than what Cubans would have expected of their nation in a time of such danger. He adds, “The Cuban people would not tolerate the head of the country ignoring medical advice, spouting nonsensical statements, and determining policy based on what would be most profitable for corporations.” Indeed, their pandemic response is only the latest of countless ways in which the Cuban medical system has proven superior to the US system.

The medical system that Cuba’s revolutionaries inherited from the old regime—more like a non-system—was a mess. Millions of Cubans, disproportionately rural and Black, has no access to health care at all. In the 1960s, the government began building a national system of outpatient polyclinics (policlínicos integrales) designed, in Fitz’s words, to “unify preventive and curative medicine” in communities. Each polyclinic was staffed, at a minimum, with “a general practice physician, nurse, pediatrician, OB/GYN, and social workers.” The polyclinics provided a single point of entry for each patient. They were highly successful, Fitz says, because they were established not in isolation but in the context of other developments: Cuba’s famously successful literacy campaign, land reform, improved farm incomes, improved diets, pensions, improved water supplies, schools, and housing, along with others. Having status within the national system equal to that of the country’s major hospitals, polyclinics had a high degree of independence. In the mid-1970s, the polyclinics began doing health risk assessments, incorporated specialist care, and made house calls a major part of the system. A decade later, single doctor-nurse teams began establishing small neighborhood consultarios, each tied to a polyclinic.

Internationally, Cuba’s health professionals are most well-known for their numerous, extensive missions to provide medical care and training in underserved or war-torn regions. The international work began in 1962 with a mission to Algeria, followed by other African nations, but it really ramped up with Cuba’s involvement in the Angola war that began in 1975 and dragged on into the 1980s. Fitz provides a richly detailed story of Cuban troops’ support for the Angolans’ fight against U.S.- and apartheid South Africa-supported rebels backed by South African mercenaries. The number of Cuban fighters in Angola reached a peak of 36,000 in 1976. Between 1975 and 1991, Cuba also sent more than 43,000 aid workers; among them, the number of Cuban medical workers in the country at any given time was as high as 800. Fitz relates some fascinating personal stories of doctors who served in the country, some of them for years. Cuban medical missions remained in Angola until 1991.

The Angola mission is the most celebrated, but Cuba’s service to Africa was far more widespread. Fitz list two dozen of the continent’s countries who collectively hosted tens of thousands of Cuban aid missions, primarily medical. They spanned the continent and the alphabet, from Benin to Guinea-Bissau to Mali to Uganda to Zambia. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cuban doctors also went to serve the revolutions in Nicaragua and Grenada. In the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, the Cuban government flew in 25,000 victims, mostly children, for treatment. In all, 164,000 medical professionals have served in 154 countries. Cuba provided medical teams in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, which hit Central America in 1999, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and other disasters. They assembled a team to go to the US after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but George W. Bush rejected the offer.

Fitz relates the Cuban medical system’s long struggle with HIV/AIDS. The disease had become serious on the island by 1986, but its cause still mysterious enough that the health system began sending AIDS patients to be quarantined in a network of sanitoria previously established for patients with highly infective diseases. Most of the quarantined were soldiers returning from Africa, so there was little notice within Cuba. The United States, always on the lookout for a club to beat Castro with, denounced Cuba for abusing the human rights of gay men. In fact, the majority of infected troops were heterosexual. The quarantine was lifted in 1989, once the disease became better understood. Cuba eventually made good progress on AIDS. The medical journal The Lancet declared Cuba’s AIDS program “among the most effective in the world.” But Cuba’s enemies continued to throw out the anti-gay trope, Fitz believes, “to distract attention from the fact that Cuba had implemented a program to combat HIV/AIDS that was better than most countries’, and, in particular, superior to US efforts.”

Fitz discusses how the collapse of the Soviet Union—which, combined with the continuing US embargo, ushered in the severe economic stresses of Cuba’s “Special Period” —placed an unprecedented burden on the superior health-care system the country had built up over three decades. The most serious health problems were a deeply inadequate food supply and shortages of drugs and medical equipment. Despite fiscal strains, writes Fitz, no hospitals were closed during the Special Period, and all regions, even in the countryside, had access to medical care. He also presents a table showing that infant mortality continued its longstanding, steady decrease through the hard years of the 1990s, and that since 2000, Cuba’s infant mortality rate has been significantly lower than that of the United States. Also in this period, the country’s huge increase in urban and small-scale food production was widely celebrated.

Over the past decade, Fitz has done much on-the-ground reporting on Cuba’s medical education system, led by its Latin American School of medicine (ELAM), and here he provides a detailed history of the system and its achievements, enlivened by extensive firsthand interviews with faculty and profiles of more than a dozen medical students.

A chapter comparing the US and Cuban medical systems features some eye-popping cost numbers: hospital stay, $1900 in US and $5 in Cuba; hernia surgery, $12,000 in US and $14 in Cuba; hip fracture, $14,000 in US and $72 in Cuba. In 2018, when the US was spending $8300 per person per year on medical care, Cuba was spending a little over $400. Fitz points out the reasons the US medical economy is so broken: insurance for profit, not health; overdiagnosis, overtreatment, over-prescribing of drugs, and overpricing; treatments that create problems requiring more treatment; the excessive salaries received by doctors and administrators; and excess profits going to owners and investors. The result: a health-care system that achieves worse performance than a highly effective one that costs 5 percent as much.

Finally, Fitz lists ten lessons to be drawn from the Cuban health-care experience, writing that “They form the basis of what I call the New Global Medicine.” Among those lessons are that health care need not be dependent on costly technology; doctors must live in the communities where they work; the medical system must be evolving and unique to each community; international medical aid must be adapted to the political climate of the host country; doctors must put healing above personal wealth; and “the new global medicine is a microcosm of how a few thousand revolutionaries can change the world.”

As the question of how to fix the US health care system resurges in the coming year, before the Covid-19 has yet passed and before new medical emergencies arise, Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution should be read as widely as possible—by lawmakers and their staffs, yes, but more importantly, by those of us who elect those lawmaker 

Stan Cox is the author of The Green New Deal and Beyond : Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can (City Lights, May, 2020) and one of the editors of Green Social Thought, where this piece first ran

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