Cuban President Spoke with Solidarity Activists Who Traveled for International Workers’ Day

A 2-year-old argument about “anti-Blackness” in Cuba, which Black solidarity activists in the United States say has no basis in reality, has reared its head.

It appeared in a video posted on Twitter on May 1 that has since gone viral, generating more than 2 million views in four days. The video features Afro-Cuban Grecia Ordoñez, who claims Cuban Revolution leaders Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara were racists who engaged in “white saviorism.” She also claimed genocide was committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the time Cuba’s revolutionary government intervened to support rebels fighting the DRC government put in place after revolutionary leader and first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in 1961. Further, she pointed to Afro-Cubans being detained in Cuba as an example of racism.

A message to black Americans from Cubans regarding Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. #Cuba🇨🇺 pic.twitter.com/kHCDnBaE6H

— Martha Bueno (@BuenoForMiami) May 1, 2023

Activists debunked her claims on Twitter, including a thread of articles and videos featuring members of anti-imperialist group Black Alliance for Peace.

For 2 years, the “anti-Blackness” claim has allowed "human rights" narratives to form around revolutionary states in the crosshairs of the U.S. empire. This video comes on the heels of one of the largest U.S. youth delegations to visit #Cuba (@PeoplesForumNYC). Here's a thread 🧵 https://t.co/oV3AhE9V0u

— Black Alliance for Peace (@Blacks4Peace) May 4, 2023

The thread included the following articles and videos:

• Hood Communist Guide to the U.S. Blockade
• Limits of Lived Experience by Erica Caines
• Out of The Clouds: Remarks on Anti- Blackness In Cuba by Salifu Mack
• Witnessing Afro Cubans and Social Change by Austin Cole
• An African Palenque: Cuba And Global Black Solidarity by Kimberly Monroe
• African Power and Politics In Cuba’s La Marina Neighborhood by Musa Springer
• Ajamu Baraka on Cuban Protests
• Afro-Cubans Against Cuba
• Black Alliance For Peace x Belly of The Beast Screening Event 
• James Early and Musa Springer on Cuba, Socialism and Race
• Black August and The Cuban Revolution

While Ordoñez doesn’t point to evidence for the claim about genocide in Congo, a 2021 article in the Journal of Cold War Studies states:

“In reality, the main purpose was to crush the rebellion and secure Western interests in Congo. The intervention reflected a cavalier attitude toward sovereignty, international law, and the use of force in postcolonial Africa and had the adverse effect of discrediting humanitarian reasoning as a basis for military intervention until the end of the Cold War. The massacre of tens of thousands of Congolese in Stanleyville was a unique moment in which African countries united in their criticism of Western policies and demanded firmer sovereignty in the postcolonial world.”

Black Activists Reject Claims of Cuba’s Racism

The Black Alliance for Peace released a statement close to two years ago after protests erupted in Cuba over claims of racism. The statement, titled, “Biden’s Commitment to U.S. White Power Is the Real Race Issue in Cuba,” concludes, “We say to all those who pretend to be concerned about Cuba to demand an end to the embargo and to respect the right of the Cuban people to work through their own problems. As the first republic established on the basis of race and subsequently invented apartheid, the United States should be the last on the planet to lecture anyone on race relations.”

Activists like Asantewaa Nkrumah-Ture raised her voice against the claim that Cuba holds Black political prisoners.

“Who are ‘Black political prisoners’ in Cuba? What are their names? What organizations do they belong to & are those organizations independent of [U.S. National Endowment for Democracy] NED and [U.S. Agency for International Development] u.s. AID? Do they belong to [movement of jailed dissidents] Ladies in White? LOL, you sound more & more like Carlos Moore,” Nkrumah-Ture tweeted. Moore is an Afro-Cuban academic who wrote a 1988 book criticizing Cuban leader Fidel Castro as using racist means to grow Cuba’s influence around the world.

Who are "Black political prisoners" in Cuba? What are their names? What organizations do they belong to & are those organizations independent of NED and u.s. AID? Do they belong to Ladies in White? LOL, you sound more & more like Carlos Moore 🇨🇺

— Mawusi Ture (@MawusiTure) May 4, 2023

Further, activist and Ph.D. candidate Kimberly Miller tweeted in reply, “Are the ‘Black political prisoners’ you’re referring to leaders of San Isidro ‘movement,’ like Luis Alcántara or Denis Solís, who admittedly had members ‘who love Trump’ and directly met w/charge d’affaires at U.S. Embassy in Havana to foment regime change??”

are the “Black political prisoners” you’re referring to leaders of San Isidro ‘movement’ like Luis Alcántara or Denis Solís who admittedly had members “who love Trump” and directly met w/chargé de affaires at US Embassy in Havana to foment regime change?? https://t.co/NUpR919H9X

— Kimberly-Dawn 🇸🇩 (@ComradeKimDawn) May 5, 2023

U.S. Solidarity Activists Detained After Visit to Cuba

Meanwhile, Ordoñez’s viral video came just as the largest solidarity delegation in recent history commemorated May Day or International Workers’ Day, alongside 100,000 Havana residents representing many sectors of work. Last year’s parade drew 700,000 Cubans in Havana, as well as thousands of people who celebrated across the island. However, this year, the more-than-60-year-old U.S. blockade on Cuba has caused fuel shortages that required Cuba to cancel the parade itself and instead organize events in Havana’s neighborhoods, as Musa Springer reported on Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary,” co-hosted by TF Board Secretary Jacqueline Luqman.

“Cubans say they are in a second Special Period,” Springer said, referring to the first Special Period that occurred after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, thereby causing drastic shortages of food, fuel and machinery in the 1990s. Cuba’s gross domestic product thus dropped by 35 percent in three years.

More than 1,000 foreigners from 58 countries, all representing 271 youth, labor, social and political organizations traveled into Cuba this year for the parade, as well as for an annual conference held the next day. The delegation, led by People’s Forum in New York City, included between 300 and 350 U.S.-based activists, including many young people who had never been to Cuba before. The People’s Forum tweeted that their delegation faced a second questioning behind closed doors upon their return to U.S. airports and that their digital devices had been confiscated for searches.

Upon arrival to U.S. airports, U.S. citizens and non-citizens usually line up at booths to be questioned by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers. Most people are allowed to continue into the United States after answering a few questions about the reason for their journey abroad. Any reason can provoke a second questioning in private, which can extend a traveler’s time inside the airport by hours.

Activist Bill Hackwell wrote in Resumen Latinoamerica English that both members of the International Peoples Assembly delegation and the LA US Hands Off Cuba Committee delegation faced a second round of interrogations, as well as device confiscations. At the time of his writing, members in those delegations had been freed.

Hackwell commented on the irony by remarking on his experience in Cuba.

“What I have seen this past week is a government here more concerned about the well-being of the next generation of U.S. youth than their own government that marginalizes them by constricting access to jobs with a living wage, that makes access to education nearly impossible without the burden of student loans that they will carry for years, and that incarcerates them at a rate like no other country in the world.”

Manolo De Los Santos, executive director of the People’s Forum, thanked the Cuban people for their solidarity.

“These unfortunate incidents are further evidence of the wrong direction of a hostile U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba,” De Los Santos concluded in the tweet. “Their actions in fact demonstrate that the U.S. is far from a bastion of democracy and human rights, and rather than intimidate us, they motivate us to strengthen our struggles for true, transformative change here in the United States.”

🇨🇺✊🏽 After hours of harassment & interrogation, all the comrades who traveled to Cuba are FREE! Thanks for all the love & solidarity received from throughout the world!!

The aggressive attitude of the Customs & Border Patrol officials towards the members of our delegation during…

— Manolo De Los Santos (@manolo_realengo) May 4, 2023

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez expressed his solidarity with the detained activists.

“Cheer up guys, we’re with you. Thank you for your courage, for supporting #Cuba and for facing the hatred of those who cannot stand the fact that the Cuban Revolution has the support of the most progressive youth in the very bowels of the beast. We send you a big hug.”

Ánimo, muchachos, estamos con ustedes. Gracias por la valentía, por apoyar a #Cuba y por enfrentar en las propias entrañas del monstruo el odio de quienes no pueden soportar que la Revolución Cubana tenga el apoyo de los jóvenes más progresistas. Les mandamos un fuerte abrazo. https://t.co/N6K2H92CaX

— Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (@DiazCanelB) May 4, 2023

U.S. Government Attacks Black Socialists

Meanwhile, the Hands Off Uhuru campaign announced via email to the press that on Tuesday, May 2, African People’s Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela and African People’s Solidarity Committee Chairwoman Penny Hess appeared in federal court in Tampa, Florida, in response to the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s April 18 indictment. The Black socialist group is accused of allegedly attempting to “sow discord” in the United States with the support of Russia.

Yeshitela, an 81-year-old Black man, and Hess, a white woman active in the movement since 1976, were “booked, restrained with handcuffs and leg irons, and held in a cell for several hours before appearing before a judge who released them on conditional bond that included a requirement to hand over their passports.

On Monday, May 8, Uhuru Solidarity Movement Chair Jesse Nevel will appear in response to the same indictment.

The group has asked the public to donate to the “Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa! Defense Fund” to help cover their legal fees.

Background information about this indictment can be found in a recent Toward Freedom article. If found guilty, the accused face up to 15 years in prison.

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom.

Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR, by Tricia Starks (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, New York, 2022)

Tricia Starks’ Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR (2022) is an exploration into the evolution of a unique industry throughout the course of the former Soviet Union.

Juxtaposed against the development of the cigarette industry in the West, the evolution of tobacco within the USSR provides a looking glass into both the distinctions between the two systems and how they both similarly confronted social pressures. In the author’s words, “[the book] presents the relationship among state, production, profit, health, culture, gender, biology, use, image, and users” (p. 10).

The Cigarette Industry’s Utility in a Nascent Socialist State

Starks begins prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, in 1917, during Lenin and his comrades’ famous train ride back to the then-Russian Empire. She proceeds to move the reader through time by commissioning a theme for the periods that she covers in each chapter, including posters and photographs for reference throughout. The book concludes with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and a brief preview of the transformation of tobacco in the immediate aftermath.

The choice to focus on the tobacco industry through the paradigm of the Soviet system is an interesting case study in what distinguished their socialist system and the particular challenges they faced throughout the 20th century. In the capitalist West, and particularly in the United States, the traditional narrative on the rise of the tobacco industry is one of capitalist marketing and the explosion of consumerism as industrial modes of production expanded throughout the century. However, despite the lack of consumption-driven marketing within the newly formed Soviet republics, the demand for tobacco was tremendous. Soviets initially smoked it in the form of a coarse Russian tobacco known as makhorka or as filterless Russian cigarettes known as papirosy, only later increasing consumption of cigarettes.

Soviet Approach to Health and Cigarettes

Lenin despised the use of tobacco, going as far as to enforce designated smoking areas and issue smoking vouchers during the revolutionaries’ train ride back to Petrograd (p. 1). Following the triumph of the October Revolution, the Soviets would go on to found the first national prophylactic [preventative] healthcare system in 1918 (p. 2). Under the leadership of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashko, the new People’s Commissariat for Public Health (known as the Narkomzdrav) quickly acknowledged the dangers of smoking and launched the world’s first mass anti-smoking campaign, calling for both wide-reaching public education and curtailment of production and distribution. However, the conditions that the USSR’s planned economy faced presented them with a difficult choice. That was because demand for tobacco far exceeded supply coming out of the destruction of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, the industry’s unions were strong, and the revenue from its sale and export was badly needed. Thus, they decided to continue production while committing to a robust propaganda campaign to inform the public about the dangers of smoking.

The perspective that the public awareness campaigns took serves as a great example of what distinguished the Soviet approach from the West. Representative of the collectivism that guided the state, posters and resources throughout the period highlighted individuals’ responsibility to their community and the social impacts of smoking. While the extent of tobacco’s danger to physical health was far from fully understood, the socialist perspective of Soviet medical professionals led them to include the social implications of smoking in their understanding of its dangers. At a delicate time for the revolutionary project, Narkomzdrav rightfully warned smoking could not only limit one’s ability to be a productive member of society, but could also drain badly needed resources from the state. Posters highlighted how smokers caused fires in factories and in homes, polluted public and personal spaces, and influenced the next generation to take up the habit.

An Unusual Analysis of Former USSR

The focus of Cigarettes and Soviets is enticing. Starks’ avoidance of Cold War-era pseudo-history and histrionic oversimplifications, which seek to disparage the Soviet project, is particularly refreshing. Starks notes:

“The depiction of tobacco as the true opiate of the masses assumes a passive smoking population and a state in total control. The potency and popularity of papirosy prepared the Soviets to have a massive market for any tobacco they produced, and for the state to interfere in the biopsychosocial bond between smoker and tobacco held danger (p. 8).”

The first anti-smoking campaign demonstrated the question of tobacco was complex and the way Soviets chose to respond illustrates their principles. Pamphlets and other materials produced during this early period criticized alcohol and tobacco for “[endangering] order, health, and political progress” as well as “[softening] consciousness (p. 95).” Narkomzdrav looked to align their message with the Bolshevik Revolution and tap into the revolutionary energy among the people to dissuade them from smoking. However, Starks also points out the Soviets were restricted in their ability to take action by both the social conditions and the concrete benefits tobacco production provided. In 1931, Anastas Mikoian, head of the People’s Commissariat of Food Industry, “praised tobacco workers for fueling the Stalinist industrialization drive (p. 111).” Mikoian was commenting on the reality the USSR faced; industry and the economy were still developing and tobacco was in high demand, able to provide welcome satisfaction in the face of shortages of other products while the revenue it produced funded development.

In later chapters of Cigarettes and Soviets, the thoughtfulness that guides the author’s exploration of the pre-Stalin era at times fades. Starks mentions the Soviets declined aid offered through the Marshall Plan, but fails to explain that this was due to the purposefully small amount offered to a country that suffered a great deal of damage throughout World War II and that the USSR recognized the strings attached to the aid in the plan (p. 157). The analysis of later decades doesn’t provide the depth to fully understand the profound changes happening within the tobacco industry and within the USSR. For example, one of the first Western industries to break into the Soviet market was tobacco, following the lead of Marlboro owner Philip Morris’ joint venture with a Soviet tobacco factory on the topically named Soiuz-Apollon cigarettes in 1975 (p. 175). However, unlike her analysis of how the post-1921 New Economic Policy era’s policies influenced tobacco imagery and propaganda, Starks does not elaborate on the post-WWII sociopolitical developments influencing the changes.

Nonetheless, Tricia Starks’ new book, Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR, is enlightening and thought-provoking. The case study on the peculiar USSR tobacco industry provides an interesting window into the Soviet project, highlighting challenges the Soviet people faced and successes the Bolshevik Revolution was able to produce.

Nick Flores is a co-founder of and organizer with Bushwick, Brooklyn-based G-REBLS, a grassroots organization as well as a member organization of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Solidarity Network. Nick holds a double-major bachelor’s degree in history and Latin American studies.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in People’s Dispatch.

The Ethiopian diaspora across the Western world is condemning the United States and the European Union for “emboldening” the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which resumed war in the northern part of the country on August 24, ending the truce initiated by the federal government in March.

“Deploring the international community, in particular the UN, United States and the EU Member states, for their continued sympathy” towards the TPLF, the Ethiopian Advocacy Organizations Worldwide (EAOW) passed a resolution on Friday, September 2. The EAOW, a consortium of 18 organizations representing Ethiopian nationals in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, South Africa, and 11 European countries, condemned the TPLF’s alleged systematic large-scale forced conscriptions—including of child soldiers—in the northernmost state of Tigray.

Thousands have been fleeing Tigray, which is under the TPLF’s control, in order to escape forced conscription. However, hundreds have been caught and arrested by the TLPF, which is waging a war against the Ethiopian federal government. Tens of thousands of conscripts were sacrificed in human wave attacks launched by the TPLF, which had advanced south into the neighboring states of Amhara and Afar last year before being beaten back into Tigray.

The resolution alleges that in order to conscript more soldiers for another round of invasion into Tigray’s neighboring states, the TPLF instituted a “one family, one soldier” policy, as the war became increasingly unpopular in Tigray itself. The group is allegedly denying food aid to families unable or unwilling to contribute soldiers. This is when, according to the World Food Programme (WFP), 83 percent of Tigray’s population is food-insecure and over 60 percent of pregnant or lactating women were malnourished as of January.

On resuming the war on August 24, the TPLF looted 12 full fuel trucks from the WFP and tankers with 570,000 liters of fuel meant to facilitate food aid delivery. Hundreds of WFP trucks which entered Tigray to distribute food aid had already been seized by the TPLF and used to mobilize its troops during its offensive last year.

“This has only reaffirmed the view [that] the TPLF should not be playing a central role in the distribution of aid in Tigray,” Bisrat Aklilu, a board member of the American Ethiopian Public Affairs Committee (AEPAC), said in a letter to WFP’s Ethiopia country director Adrian van der Knaap.

He called on the WFP “to undertake an urgent review of its processes and to identify any misuse of aid by the TPLF… Given the sheer number of Ethiopians in need in Tigray, Afar and Amhara regions, it would be an unforgivable scandal if WFP’s humanitarian assistance is ending up in the hands of rebel forces rather than the vulnerable communities who are suffering.”

“Deploring the deafening silence of the International Community in condemning such blatant violation of international law by TPLF,” the resolution urged the international community to force the TPLF to come to the negotiating table.

The federal government led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has kept the door open for negotiations under the African Union (AU). AU’s High-Representative for the Horn of Africa, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, had met with the government’s and TPLF’s leaders several times during the months of truce.

The EAOW resolution has called on the international community to “reiterate the peace process under the undisputed leadership” of the AU.

However, dismissing the AU as incompetent, the TPLF had effectively called for Western intervention only two days before resuming the war. It made particular references to the United States and the EU, whose envoys had met its leaders only weeks before it resumed the war.

“To date, the American Ethiopian community has been disappointed with the United States Government’s approach to the conflict, which has been perceived as more favorable to the TPLF terrorist group than the democratically elected government of Ethiopia,” the American Ethopian Public Affairs Committee (AEPAC) said in a press release.

AEPAC, which is a part of the EAOW and a signatory to its resolution, will be holding demonstrations and rallies on Tuesday, September 6, in Washington D.C., and other cities in the United States.

“The rallies will have a clear objective—to call on the U.S. government to support peace over violence in Ethiopia,” its statement said. “The only way to give peace a chance for the people of Ethiopia and ensure stability in [the] Horn of Africa is to end the TPLF’s violence. AEPAC will continue to engage U.S. legislators and the administration to educate them on the facts on the ground and views of the diaspora.”