Two Pandemics, Two World Approaches, and Lessons: Cuba and the United States

Last November, unaware that a novel coronavirus pandemic was a few months away, the Des Moines Register published an article to mark the upcoming World AIDS Day (December 1).

Since mainstream media are only allowed to praise achievements of communist systems 30, 40, 50 years after the fact, if at all, the lead to the 2019 article read "On Global AIDS Day, researchers argue Cuba quarantine three decades ago controlled spread of HIV."

Cuba's quarantine of HIV+ people into sanitaria in the early 1980's was criticized at the time by some in the West in predictable bad faith as further proof that Cuba's Revolution denied its citizens basic human rights and was bent on becoming an island gulag, by not laying out all the facts. Not only did this bad-faith criticism lack basic reporting but it also ignored over time the positive results of Cuba's response to what became a global AIDS pandemic, results that seem appreciated by everyone else in the world except the United States, as the Des Moines Register acknowledges many years afterward.

No US newspaper, not even the Des Moines Register, would have published such praise for anything from the achievements of the Communist Party of Cuba, not even in the 1990's after the destruction of the socialist camp, let alone in the midst of a 2020 COVID-19 pandemic where the health of the economy is put over the health of the community.

CONTEXTS TO CUBA'S RESPONSE

My first trip to Cuba was in 1992. This was just a few months after the destruction of the USSR and several years into its quarantine policy, which US media had warned were like concentration camps. I arranged with some Cuban government officials to visit the Santiago de Las Vegas AIDS Sanatorium outside Havana. The morning of the visit, it was suddenly canceled. So instead of first-hand knowledge of what was going on in the sanitaria, I was left to get impressions of the policy from people I met, including gay men.

In that month-long visit I did get first-hand knowledge of what a poor country, having just lost its main partners in the Eastern bloc, and blockaded by the US, was doing to preserve its attention to social welfare and to preserve the gains of the Revolution. These first-hand impressions continue to radically inform me. As to the quarantine, all of the Cubans I met knew of the policy. Some knew people in sanitaria. But between the fears of the virus in those days and the Revolution's commitment to free health care, these Cubans seemed to view the quarantine as an extended hospital stay, not the gulag or concentration camp I had been warned about by Cuba's Yankee neighbor to the north.

Recall in very early 1980's, neither Cuba nor the rest of the world understood the pathology of the AIDS virus. According to a UC researcher, it was Fidel who had heard early reports of this mysterious infection from his troops in Southern Africa, where some were being treated. During a 1983 visit with the president of Kenya to Cuba’s Institute of Tropical Medicine, Fidel asked the doctors what they had learned about it. The doctors dismissed it, but Fidel assured them "You are wrong. AIDS is going to be the disease of the century, with many populations ravaged. It’s your responsibility to see that this does not happen in Cuba."

Hysterics were so great often doctors and nurses in US hospitals refused to go near the infected patients. Recall also that Cubans having been dealt blows of biological warfare from the US seriously considered this was another such US attack (the United States allegedly spread a dengue epidemic on the island and had sprayed an herbicide on its crops, among other acts of sabotage against Cuba's Revolution).

Further, the early appearance of the infection in Cuban soldiers in Africa fueled rumors the virus had been created by apartheid South African scientists as part of its wars in Southern Africa.

THE REVOLUTION'S PROMISE

Thirty years late, to Des Moines Register standards, and just in time for the novel coronavirus, there are still lessons the government of the United States can learn from Cuba's AIDS as well as its COVID-19 policies.

First, a few facts about Cuba's response to the AIDS pandemic.

* Most of the early cases were not gay men or men who have sex with men but rather heterosexual Cuban veterans from the African liberation wars, like in Angola and Mozambique, who had seemingly been exposed in Africa.

* In quarantine in rural sanitaria, the infected were still provided their monthly state salaries and afforded full health care - health care which in those early days of the AIDS pandemic was admittedly dismal and more like hospice care for those seriously affected.

* As science learned more about how HIV works, Cuba loosened the restrictions on the quarantine, eventually allowing the patients to leave their sanitaria for the day to visit family or go to their jobs.

* The quarantine policy ended completely in 1997 and since then Cuba routinely tests the population, provides antiretroviral medications free to all HIV+ Cubans, and has implemented an HIV and sex health element in all its primary and secondary schooling.

* According to the World Health Organization (WHO), besides the 451 community-based polyclinics that serve as the backbone to the island's health service, the sanitaria were converted to Centers for Comprehensive Care for People with HIV/AIDS after 1997 and "mainly provide ambulatory HIV care and education on how to live with the virus. This education includes information on the importance of healthy diet, good personal hygiene and compliance with treatment."

* Consequent to its early response to HIV and its sex education, Cuba has the lowest rate of HIV infection in the Caribbean and in all of Latin America. According to the North American Congress on Latin America's (NACLA) report "Cuba’s HIV Sanatoriums: Prisons or Public Health Tool?", "by 1992, Puerto Rico had 8,000 AIDS cases, or 229 per 100,000 residents, while Cuba had just 95—or a rate of one per 100,000 residents."

Cuba's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, despite a vicious tightening of the US blockade by the Trump regime, is similarly stellar.

CUBA AND COVID-19

Again, according to the WHO, Cuba has had a total of 128 deaths from COVID-19 [as of October 24, 2020] out of a population of over 11 million. Belgium, a country of comparable size, has had over 10,000 deaths [see https://covid19.who.int/table]. The US has exceeded 220,000 deaths.

So what can we learn from Cuba's rapid response and implemented programs to the HIV/AIDS pandemic to apply to the present COVID-19 pandemic? Arguably the same we can learn from any of the countries governed by communist parties, including Cuba, the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam.

Of those three, Cuba might be the cash-poorest and most maligned, and yet many of its social health indices outrank the global North, including with COVID-19.

In line with the island's earlier medical responses, The Center for Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology (CIGB) has joined in the worldwide race for a COVD-19 vaccine. Cuba's is named "Soberana-01" (or, Sovereign-01) and is slated to be ready in 2021.

Since 2001, Cuba's pharmaceutical infrastructure has produced generic antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV.  CIGB has already produced a lung cancer vaccine and earlier one for meningitis B. The US blockade against Cuba prohibits access to these treatments that the rest of the world benefits on the grounds the money goes to entities owned by the Cuban Communist Party.

Cuba did not respond to the coronavirus with more sanitaria as it did with the earlier AIDS pandemic, but despite its reliance on tourism, it did shut down the tourist industry, beginning with stopping flights to and from Italy, one of the island's main source of tourism from the European Union. This has undoubtedly increased challenges and deprivations, as it would any First-World country (a similar shutdown by New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has yielded positive results for human health but the treasury has taken a hit).

But given the WHO data, and reports from the Cuban government itself, these challenges and deprivations clearly have not come at the cost of the Revolution's commitments to the Cuban people's lives.

CUBA MODELS THE BEST BEHAVIOR

In light of these facts, Cuba's response to both the HIV and COVID-19 pandemics was measured, principled, and appropriate. It reprioritized resources to ensure the new patients got what care was available, their wages were paid in full, and they did not lose their housing, and it took measures to protect the wider public.

In neither pandemic crisis, Cuba did not do what the US governments under Reagan in the early 80's, or Trump in 2020 did - while Reagan could not speak the words of what was happening as the HIV pandemic grew, and while Trump was lying about it. Cuba mobilized.

The US has essentially told its workers, the unemployed, and the evicted: good luck, you're on your own.

Incidentally, as it continued to address the HIV pandemic, Cuba's protocols did not end with lowering HIV infection in adults, and it won't end with finding a vaccine for COVID-19. In 2016, the WHO reported that "Cuba became the first country in the world to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis as public health problems." 

As of 2020, Cuba is now only a handful of countries that has successfully stopped mother-to-child transmission of the HIV virus. According to the World Health Organization, only Armenia, Belarus, and Thailand have followed Cuba's example since then.

While the United States continues to mismanage the containment of this virus and fails to address the escalating needs of its people, the answer is a clear yes that we have much to learn from Cuba's example and what a socialist government mindful of its people will behave.

What could a rich country like the US learn from Cuba's example, one with infinitely more resources? Much.

Kamala Harris, for which People? A Response to People's World article

[Note: this is in response to Mark Gruenberg's article in People's World headlined "Selection of Kamala Harris as VP candidate makes history" A few days before, during a conference call during which Party members complained strongly about the Gruenberg piece, the editors said they'd consider printing a reply. I wrote one. In rejecting the reply, the news site's editor-in-chief, John Wojcik, wrote, in part, "it seems all you want to do is be hypercritical of anything we do. We are going to be busy in the coming months fighting to make sure Trump is not reelected so we will not have much time between now and the election to deal with all of your complaints or to spend a great deal of time editing out of your articles so many things that contradict the party program." Wojcik's reply is important: for one, it's pure deflection; two, he went back on his word to post a reply, and, equally important, is the CP and the PW have always asserted their separateness. Wojcik just confirmed they are not separate at all.]

The issues with the article begin with the headline, which may or may not be of Gruenberg's making. Within 24 hours of being named his pick for vice-president, People's World  pivoted right under the guise of helping the working class it has made its mission for 100 years by suggesting the Harris nomination is "historic.'

Harris has not made any history, but history made her. True enough, the Black women who led our radical movements in any arena proved that their worth exceeded their male counterparts, despite male chauvinism rampant in many of these movements. The efforts, blood, sweat, and tears of those Black women produced this moment for Harris. Harris played no part in these movements nor pretended to. More importantly, she plays no part in such a movement today. Her career as a prosecutor show this.

History made Harris. What Harris has done with this inheritance is what demands scrutiny. The rightwing movement within the Democratic Party demands equal analysis. While her Wikipedia page is being sanitized, one would expect People's World and Gruenberg to stick to "just the facts" and be a little more discerning.

Harris has taken the inheritance that produced this moment and, since the beginning of her political career, turned it into a heat-seeking missile against the class that engaged this struggle, which includes Black women.

Despite Harris polling below 5% after her failed presidential campaign [Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar ranked much higher and have more leftist credentials], Gruenberg makes what must be a fanciful assertion to link Harris' pick as "in a move that is widely expected to boost voter turnout."

How? I am challenged to find the dots to connect that draw this conclusion between her low approval rate with the rhetoric coming out of "national union leaders" cited in Gruenberg's article. Clearly, she has boosted the approval of some labor leaders, but this doesn't jive with the poll numbers. I have some questions for these labor leaders: another time, another article.

Linking her rise in California's Democratic Party machine to her brief courtship to California Assembly speaker, later mayor, Willie L. Brown, is admittedly very dangerous ground to tread. But allowing for her own intelligence, competence, and hard-work ethic does not negate that ours is not a meritocracy, especially when it comes to Black and Brown women. So her early appointments to various state commissions may or may not be related to that Harris-Brown courtship, but even after she reportedly dumped him, he continued to support her rise in San Francisco politics.

The reason for the break up itself is curious: she said it was his womanizing. To those of us living in the Bay Area at the time, Brown was known to be a solidly married man and a serial dater. It was a mature understanding between he and his wife, two consenting adults, and without controversy. Was Harris, who was 29 to Brown's 60, the only woman in the San Francisco Bay Area not to know this?

By Harris' own admission, the affair became an "albatross" to her future political aspirations, starting with Brown's famously gifting her a brand-new BMW.

The pivotal moment came in the San Francisco District Attorney race. Harris ran against her former boss, incumbent District Attorney, Terence Hallinan. The Irish Hallinan family were, like the Italian Aliotos, a famous, liberal, San Francisco family - only the Hallinans tended further left than that. Unlike the Roman Catholic Aliotos, the Hallinan patriarch was a lifelong socialist and an atheist.

Hallinan's father was Vincent Hallinan of the same Progressive Party as Henry Wallace, FDR's one-time vice president and presidential candidate. Despite Wallace's defeat as a Progressive Party candidate in 1948, the Communist Party USA, which endorsed him, also endorsed Vincent Hallinan in 1952 (his running mate, incidentally, was a Black woman, Charlotta Bass). These are the only times the CPUSA has endorsed non-Communist Party candidates.

Hallinan's mother was Vivian [Moore] Hallinan, who headed the Women's International League for Peace & Freedom, ran her husband's presidential campaign when the feds jailed him during his defense of the Communist Party's Harry Bridges, and attended Daniel Ortega's inauguration as Sandinista president of Nicaragua.

Terence Hallinan took his parents' leads. Before winning elections to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and then District Attorney, Hallinan studied at the London School of Economics, founded by Fabian Society socialists Beatrice and Sydney Webb; he worked for the ILWU in Hawaii, which was chartered by Communist Party members Jack Wayne Hall, and Charles and Eileen Fujimoto; and he joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in 1963 where he spent a summer in Mississippi. He helped organize the WEB DuBois Club in San Francisco with the CPUSA, and co-founded a group to end racial discrimination in some of the San Francisco's popular sites.

Terence Hallinan is the one named in Hallinan vs Committee of Bar Examiners for the State of California. Despite graduating law school in 1965 and passing the California bar exam, the courts refused to certify him based on his political activities. Hallinan's suit went to the California Supreme Court, where he won.

Another of Vincent Hallinan's sons, Terence's brother, Conn Hallinan, is a columnist for Foreign Policy Focus and was editor of People's World when it was a West Coast publication

The details of this radical pedigree are important to the Kamala Harris story. Because it was in a changing, post-Cold War San Francisco of the that Hallinan's far left-wing stance [Joe Alioto called them "the social conscience of San Francisco] was no longer convenient to the creeping neoliberal, anti-poor, antilabor consensus of Reagan and the Bill Clinton New Democrats. Ahead of the contentious 2003 District Attorney race between incumbent Hallinan and insurgent Harris, the powerful San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee withheld its endorsement of Hallinan, evening the ground for his competitor, the insurgent, law-and-order Kamala Harris. This greenlighted some local unions and Democratic Party Clubs to fund her campaign against his.

Harris was a clear contrast to Hallinan, and she was intended to be.  Her rise to power was understood for what it was by us activists within the class war raging in San Francisco in those days. 

Hallinan opposed the novel "three-strikes" laws that disproportionately impacted Black and Brown people. Harris demanded more prosecutions of antiwar protestors. Hallinan wanted to liberalize drug possession and prostitution. Harris set up stings with undercover cops which entrapped largely Latino men. Harris' remedy to truancy in the public schools was the lock up parents, which disproportionately impacted Black women.

The heart of Harris' campaign to unseat Hallinan was he was too soft on crime. The heart of the movement that Harris did belong was moving the Democratic Party program further to the right.

We understood this struggle then, and many of us understand what Harris represents now. Harris' unseating of Hallinan was another turn of the screw against the working class and Black and Brown communities of San Francisco. More broadly, it confirmed a rightward shift within the Democratic Party. 

Only the most reactionary interpretation of Identity Politics would elevate this candidate to anything "historic" based on her African and South Asian ancestry. Yet what else does this lifelong prosecutor bring to the table? Certainly not any progressive movement. There is nothing new or historic about her stance against the working class and in favor of giant corporations (a priority she shares with her one-time partner, Willie Brown).

This vice-presidential nomination signals further shifts to the right for a Democratic Party barely in the camp of the working class of this country or the world. It is a Democratic Party that has served rhetoric to labor unions - despite what certain labor leaders say - and held the same course when it comes to trades-union movements in the global South, which are seen as antagonists to US capitalism.

What Harris' nomination and the People's World headline should have indicated is her elevation is a signal that the left has no home in this campaign or in their potential administration, and that the same forces that guided Biden and San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee, will continue to guide her as vice president and a President Biden.

No doubt we must make informed, strategic decisions this November to the threat Trump represents, but the analyses this demands is not helped by propping up an extremely problematic candidate with fluff pieces - a candidate which the base on the left have no affection for. Leave those sorts of machinations to the DNC PR staff.

A Word about Hawaii and the Reds

L-R, Dwight Freeman, Dr. John Reinecke, Koji Ariyoshi, Jack Kimoto, an attorney [dark suit], 

Charles Fujimoto, Eileen Fujimoto, and Jack Wayne Hall

Absent from the website of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People is the true beginning and ending of its Honolulu chapter. While the composition of the Black population of the territory of Hawaii was negligible, friends and allies of the Black struggle - Black, white, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese were engaged in this struggle on many fronts, including through the NAACP in Honolulu in the 1940's.

But the organization's website lists May 1960 as the founding of the chapter, just one year after the territory of Hawaii was admitted as the 50th state, and this is not true.

By 1949, the Cold War was in deep-freeze mode, and the paranoia to ferret out suspected Communists and their friends reached high gear.

NAACP co-founder WEB DuBois had not so much called himself a communist, and he would not officially join the Communist Party USA until 1960, but he had much earlier gone to the Soviet Union and declared himself publicly a "Bolshevik."

To continue the dangerous mixed metaphors, temperatures ran high as the deep freeze of anticommunist paranoia raged. The rage was not limited to the Congressional House hearings chaired by J. Parnell Thomas - the ones we rarely talk about which precede the more famous ones later led by the US senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. Nor were the hearings limited to the capitol of the United States, Washington DC. Hearings to ferret out communists were staged in different parts of the country, including such fly-over states as St. Louis, MO, and in Territory of Hawaii.

Postwar, Cold War events unfolded at a rapid pace leading up to the late 1940's and a collision with the Honolulu chapter of the NAACP.

ILWU Strike

One of the CIO's most militant labor unions, the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), staged two successful labor strikes. In 1946, it was by 26,000 sugar workers, then in 1949 of the Hawaii territory's longshoremen. The longshore strike went on for 177 days and although ultimately a success for the union led by CPUSA's Australian-born Harry Bridges, the territorial legislature called its own witch-hunt hearings and requested the investigative powers of the US Senate committee.

Effectively two Star Chambers were looking under every bed and on every lanai for a Communist to blame and indict. It was the Communists, but it was also the condition increasingly put on the island's white elite to be admitted to statehood: get rid of the Communist Party.

Naturally the Communist Party of Hawaii and the ILWU had a lot of overlapping officers, especially at the top. Among the rank and file, the depth of Marxist-Leninism varied from worker to worker, comrade to comrade. Just as naturally, the gains they were making as workers were linked like two peas in a pod of the CP of Hawaii and the union.

The witch hunts opened up these disparities and made room for snitches to turn on the people who had fought for them.

But just so, the famous Jack Wayne Hall, for whom a building is named in Hilo, HI, was the ILWU representative. Eileen Toshiko Fujimoto was executive secretary of the ILWU on the islands. Both were Central Committee members of the Communist Party of Hawaii.

Fujimoto's husband, Kauai-born Charles Fujimoto, a University of Hawaii graduate student in chemistry, became what was the Hawaii Party's last general secretary.

All four of these Hawaii Communists, as well as school teachers and central committee John Reinecke and his wife, were simultaneously members of the Honolulu chapter of the NAACP.

This might make outsiders do a double take if you don't know the history of the Communist Party USA or its stance around the world, including in apartheid South Africa. The Party's stance was not only non-racial but also anti-racist.

So workers in the Pacific Northwest and Deep South, as well as in the territory of Hawaii, were organized together, integrated, across racial lines. This was the commitment of the Party, and it drew Black and white, and a broader range of peoples in Hawaii.

This was too much for the largely white, landed elites of the Hawaii Territory, so just as they had earlier called in the US Marines to overthrow the sovereign Hawaii government, they called in a Congressional witch hunt to put a stop to the self-determination of the labor movement.

The First Casualties

With the territorial and Congressional investigations into subversion, Communists were in the cross-hairs. The FBI stepped up its goal to expose Harry Bridges and deport him. Only the firmest and the hardest backbones stood with the comrades who had been fighting since the 30's to organize agricultural and dock workers in Hawaii. Others could not risk association.

Some comrades, like Jack Kimono, left the Party and became a snitch, for which he was nicely rewarded with poverty and obscurity in the long run. Kimono had been with the Hawaii Party almost since its founding in 1936.

Other names were exposed under testimony, like Robert and Ah Quon McElrath, both organizers with the ILWU, and two unknown comrades who were active in labor struggles and within the NAACP, were named. Ewart and Eugenia Guinier.

The Guiniers, an interracial couple, met and married in Hawaii and besides labor organizing, they did work supplying the local military bases.

Once their links to the Communist Party were revealed in testimony, their days were numbered.

The McElraths were able to keep under the radar, even though Robert was also a member of the Hawaii Party's central committee.

The NAACP was not so lucky.

By 1949, the contentiousness within the Honolulu chapter had grown so intense, members were writing cables to the main office warning of Communist sects taking over. Whether it was a sect or not, the ensuing election saw the Communists win the local presidency of the chapter.

This was too much and too far. So as the US is wont to do in elections it does not like, the NAACP refused to recognize the election and for good measure de-certified the chapter altogether. It disappeared and would not reappear on the NAACP official history until 1960.

But wait. There's more. This was the incident which infamously pivoted the civil rights organization to direct all its chapters to expel Communists and cease working with them in any capacity.

This forever shifted the NAACP to the center-right, as contingents of Black Communists chose the Party that was the backbone of the labor movement and civil rights over the organization that thought it could walk or crawl without that backbone. These comrades quietly left.

More than Seven Mules

In hindsight, they might have been safer all abandoning ship. Conventional history has all but erased this history when under the cover of the anticommunist Smith Act the full force of the US government, its federal police, and an array of local thug cops in places in the Deep South and California went after, infiltrated, kidnapped, murdered, and arrested members of a domestic political party.

Bill Bailey in later life

The Hawaii Party's first general secretary, the very able labor organizer Bill Bailey, was chased out of the island by the late 30's when he was alerted a corporate hit squad was targeting him. To Bailey's first group of recruits into the Party, he reportedly turned to the red flag on the wall: "That's my Bible. We've got to go out and visit people and talk and talk and begin to organize the workers."

The gospel Bailey was organizing was too much for the island's bourgeoisie planter and shipping class.

In the wake of the territorial and federal witch hunts after World War II and the strikes, the FBI coordinated the arrests of 125 Communist Party leaders in a nationwide sweep that extended to the island territory.

Arrested in Hawaii were most of the central committee, including Charles Kazuyuki Fujimoto, his wife Eileen Toshiko Fujimoto, Dr. John Reinecke, Jack Wayne Hall, Koji Ariyoshi, Dwight Freeman, and Jack Denichi Kimoto.

The local newspaper dubbed them "the seven mules of Moscow" and actually manufactured letters to the editor against the arrestees from a supposed concerned citizen.

For being Communists, John Reinecke and his wife Aiko were both fired from their teaching jobs and denied their pensions for 20 years until a graduate student's dissertation revived their cause, and the state reversed itself.

Koji Ariyoshi with Mao Zedong

Koji Ariyoshi, a journalist born in Kona on the Big Island, continued to run his labor-centered newspaper, the Honolulu Record, until the late 50's.

Hall continued his labor organizing into the 1960's when he moved to California as ILWU's regional vice president. He is arguably one of the most recognized name of the bunch, which is unfortunate.

Ah Quon McElrath

The McElraths - Bob and Ah Quon - were spared in the FBI sweep, but the Guiniers, newly jobless, left Hawaii back to the US mainland where the witch hunt followed them.

Ah Quon McElrath became a pillar in the civil rights community on the island, founded and chaired the Committee on Social Welfare, organized with civil rights workers in Alabama, and was an early backer of the University of Hawaii's Hawaiian Studies program.

L-R, Herbert Aptheker, Ewart Guinier, and Alice Childress

Upon leaving Hawaii to New York City, Ewart Guinier became secretary-treasurer of one of the last Communist-run CIO unions, United Public Workers of America, which in its waning years of the 1950's took in Communist school teachers expelled from the American Federation of Teachers. He was subpoenaed to reveal names by the US Senate witch hunt but refused. He was named in said hearings as "one of the most effective Stalinist operatives that there is, who takes advantage of the fact that he is a Negro, because any attack upon him in this critical time is immediately turned into an attack on the Negro people, which of course is fantastic, but because of that Guinier has become a very powerful figure in Stalinist circles in New York."

The Guinier's first daughter, Lani - as in Lani Guinier, the esteemed law scholar and one-time Clinton nominee for the Office of Civil Rights - was born in 1950 ("Lani" is Hawaiian for heaven or sky).

Ewart Guinier went on to be the first chair of the Black Studies Department at Harvard, a curious elevation for a labor organizer, but consider the university had exhausted a list of literary giants, like Ralph Ellison, John Hope Franklin, and others refused the position before turning to Guinier, who accepted it.

Guinier, perhaps too true to his labor roots and not wanting to be a fixture for white liberalism, immediately butted heads with the white Harvard establishment and publicly called out one of its Black professors as "a patronized and colonized slave."

Denouement

That said, the Hawaii Party's members did get dispersed; Eugene Dennis, chair of the Communist Party USA at the time, announced in 1956 that the Hawaii Party was no more. Since this was only technically true, as the Communists were still there, this might have been a submission to Cold War tactics and a concession to one consensus to end the territory's second-class status and meet the terms for it to become the 50th state (the Party members would have well remembered how, unlike on the US mainland, military rule had been imposed during the war and territorial legislators locked up). The other consensus, richly debated, was about the overthrow of a sovereign nation by US Marines.

But whether dispersed to California or New York, or remaining in Hawaii, the core of the Hawaii Party carried on a struggle, and we should remember them for that.

Hawaii ILWU solidarity picket [date unknown]

The Subversive Side to the Queen of Salsa

''Subject is inadmissible to the United States because of her affiliation with the Cuban Communist youth organization and the Communist Party of Cuba." - FBI memo, 1959

A year after her death in 2003, the Miami Herald, of all newspapers to do so, printed the results of an investigation by one of its reporters, Carol Rosenberg, into some little-known parts of the life of Cuban salsa singer Celia Cruz. The reports filled two separate news stories in 2004, the first in July, the second in September.

As surprising as the story itself, that the Herald put its resources toward it seems unbelievable given that it centered in the Vatican of anticommunist, anti-Cuban Revolution: the city-state of Miami-Dade. It would have been the last newspaper to do so on my list.

The report, which involved Freedom of Information documents, revealed that Cruz, who was born in Cuba in 1925, had been a member of its communist party, the Popular Socialist Party [PSP] and its youth wing since her teens, and how this decision affected her life at least until the mid-1960's.

The Popular Socialist Party

The PSP was founded the year of Cruz's birth by trade-union organizers and intellectuals like Blas Roca Calderio, Anibal Escalante, Fabio Grobart, Alfonso Bernal del Riesgo, and Julio Antonio Mello as the Communist Party of Cuba [CPC]. It was founded in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which gave workers around the world its first possibility of a socialist, workers state. Reportedly due to a brief spell of "Browderism," the Party changed its name in the 1940's from the CPC to the PSP when Cruz would have joined and the Party's membership grew the strongest. 

The exact date of her membership is not revealed in unclassified FOI documents. .

Roca rose quickly in the Party, being relocated to Havana from his hometown where he led a shoemakers union in Manzanillo.

In Havana is where he met Cruz. His star also rose in the labor movement; hers as a young Black woman who had trained to be a school teacher but was encouraged to pursue singing. He became the Party's general secretary in 1933 at the young age of 26, and remained in that post until the PSP was merged into the post-1959 Revolution Cuban Communist Party.

Cruz's trajectory continued upward and took its biggest leap when, in 1950, Latin America's most popular band, La Sonora Matancera, hired her as its lead singer.

In the meantime, besides being a Marxist theoretician and union leader, Roca would be one of Cruz's main handlers from within the Party. In fact, Roca reportedly recruited many prominent Cubans into the Party, like writer Alejo Carpentier, poet Nicolas Guillen, and singer Omara Portuondo.

For the first report, the Herald's reporter contacted Cruz's widower, her manager and one-time trumpet player for La Sonora Matancera, [Geronimo] Pedro Knight, about the revelations. Despite Cruz saying for years that one of the secrets to her happy marriage was open communication, Knight claims not to have known of his wife's party membership. Further, surprisingly, he said they did not talk politics.

For the subsequent, second report, Rosenberg reached out to Cruz's last manager, Omer Pardillo-Cid, but he only demonstrates the proof, revealed in the FOIA releases, that the late singer had donated funds to an anti-Castro group in 1964, but he is not quoted in the story as to her communist party connections.

The Connections

Different spins can be put to this revelation. Before I give my own, I'll brush over the conventional one the Herald puts into its story.

The Herald speculates that because the radio station that featured a young Cruz, Radio 1010, was owned and operated by the PSP, her membership was merely incidental. Perhaps it was an unwritten employment expectation.

This spin not only denies Cruz any agency - a young Black woman deciding herself that, like the Communist Party USA, it was, at the time the only broad force battling racism, poverty, and workers' rights - but the Herald's spin also misses some coincidences: Cruz joined the Party's youth wing earlier as a teen [probably when she began her teacher education], before she chose a career in music. The Herald story does not remind us that a young Raul Castro was also a member of this same PSP youth wing. Further, the story does not remind us of the friendship between Cruz and one of Raul's and Fidel's sisters, Agustina, who remained in Cuba, supported the Revolution, and made US headlines when she attended a Mass in honor of Cruz in 2003 after the singer's death.

The Herald's spin also does not explain why the La Sonora Matancera bandmembers, who performed on Radio 1010, were not Party members - at least, they were never subjected to anticommunist scrutiny like Cruz was.

These are dots that may have no connection at all but should certainly have intrigued a reporter who went this far for this paper to report such a story.

While older brother Fidel's Marxism has been cloaked in mystery before the 1959 Revolution, Raul's and Che's is without doubt. It was their Marxism that brought Che and Raul together in Mexico, possibly from PSP connections there.

Raul as a Young Communist League member organized for the PSP in Cuba and was sent to Europe for a Youth Festival. He was also put in contact with Soviet officials who later facilitated Cuba-Soviet relations post 1959.

While a picture of Cruz's ideological bent is not disclosed from the declassified documents, the Herald reveals that Roca, who distinguished himself as a top recruiter for the Party, was her main handler, and she was sent to Venezuela to meet with its communist party leaders under the auspice of a 1953 concert performance in Caracas.

Otherwise, a complete story of Cruz's activism is still obscure partly by US State Department documents that have not been declassified, but also admittedly by the Cuban government itself who found no further reason to promote her after she left with the band in 1960.

PSP general secretary Blas Roca

Mind you, none of Cruz's activity was missed by the red-obsessed United States government, who had agents in Cuba and which was orchestrating witch hunts under every bed, on the Hollywood film lots, at the docks, and within Black civil rights organizations.

One of the later declassified FBI documents from 1955 describes Cruz as the "well-known communist singer and stage artist."

Another document has her showing support as a co-signatory for a PSP front group, the Pro-Peace Congress, in the PSP's magazine, Hoy.

The Herald piece reveals that at least on three occasions after Cruz had been hired by the famous band, the US State Department denied her a visa to perform in the US due to her PSP membership.

One of the ironies of both Cruz and Raul's PSP membership is that the PSP opposed both the Fidel-led July 26th rebellion of 1953 and the armed struggle from the Sierra Maestra in 1956-1959. The PSP also had endorsed the Orthodox Party, under which Fidel ran as a Cuban senator, in 1952 - elections which the US had cancelled with a Batista coup.

The PSP dismissed the rebels  as "adventurers." As PSP members we do not know what Cruz or Raul thought, but the appellation "adventurer' reminds me of how some in the Communist Party USA allegedly labelled a young Angela Davis after her indictment and arrest. According to former CPUSA member and close friend of Davis, Bettina Aptheker, the Central Committee of the Party considered expelling Davis as "an adventurer."

It was not until the 11th hour, after US-backed Fulgencio Battista had fled and Cuba's mercenary armed forces had surrendered, that Blas Roca sent an emissary to the Sierra Maestra to offer the PSP's support.

For her part, Cruz, by then one of Cuba's most popular singers, joined the bandwagon with her PSP comrades and sung homages to Fidel.

Exile?

Cruz and the La Sonora band left Cuba in June 1960. This circumstances surrounding this are cloaked in contradictions. 

According to Cruz, she did not know they were taking a one-way flight until they were out of Cuban airspace, and bandleader, Rogelio Martinez, who had hired Cruz against record label SEECO's opposition, announced "this was a trip with no return." 

The myth we are told is Celia fled communism with the band. This lie is retold despite Cruz herself and her family in Cuba contradicting it.

At the time of that June 1960 flight, Cruz's mother had terminal bladder cancer, and Cruz, besides helping her family financially, was paying for her mother's hospice care. Cruz says her mother was given four or five years to live, and Cruz wanted to ensure she was well cared for.

So it seems hard to believe Martinez, who would have known this, would keep such a one-way flight, if true, a secret from Cruz.

La Sonora Matancera had a performance contract in Mexico. Cruz says she went because that's how she made her money to pay for her mother's care. Cruz says she did not know until they were in air flying over the Gulf of Mexico that the band had no intention of returning to Cuba.

Cruz's family in Cuba are on record stating not only that she was not fleeing communism but to the story that she was denied entry to bury her mother a few years later, that they were unaware she had ever asked to come back. Family members in Cuba stated that Cruz by that time was in the US, was contracted to perform, and this was how she helped support her family on the island.

She had even fulfilled a performance contract the day she found out her mother died in 1962.

Hard to tell who this hard-to-believe story serves, but an FBI memo dated September 3, 1959 states of Cruz: "Subject is inadmissible to the United States because of her affiliation with the Cuban Communist youth organization and the Communist Party of Cuba."

The FBI memo was written in response to Cruz's 1959 application, along with other Cuban musicians, to perform in New York City and Miami to raise money for the new revolutionary government.

So was the tale that Cruz and La Sonora were on a one-way trip invented later, to solidify her anticommunist bona fides, as she would be forced to do to a suspicious US State Department?

All this changed a few years after the Revolution. 

Photo taken at Havana's Airport June 1960 as Celia and La Matancera leave

But Cruz being allowed into the US from Mexico in order to perform in Los Angeles begins the turn to the right where Cruz was to position herself, to an increasing extent, for the rest of her exile.

Clearing Names

The initial Herald story quotes cables from the US embassy in Mexico that Cruz had reached out and  "wanted to clear her name" in order to accept the Hollywood Palladium contract. 

"Clearing her name," I'd argue, is code to students of the McCarthy period.

This is the odious task that some Party members relished doing and many others were coerced into. It was what got them off the blacklist. It entailed making public anticommunist confessionals and, moreover, naming and exposing your comrades. It was a nasty business.

It happened to Black singer Lena Horne, who was recruited into the CPUSA by her friend and Party member Paul Robeson. But when the blacklist hit, Horne was put out of work and went to Nevada, then a no-man's-land, to make ends meet. As this proved difficult for any artist of the day, and especially a Black woman, Horne reached out that wanted to "clear her name," which included naming her friend Robeson. She was restored back to Jim Crow Hollywood.

While Horne would maintain a secret friendship with Robeson, no evidence yet exists what Cruz did to remove her name from the US State Department blacklist and gain entry into the US or what comrades she remained close with. But her anticommunism was born and only grew more pronounced - especially during the last years of her life.

The second Herald report reveals that when Cruz was ultimately allowed into the US it was on a US State Dept. waiver necessitated by US law restricting known communists. This law was used to deport CPUSA leader, Claudia Jones to the United Kingdom. How and why she qualified for this waiver is unclear.

The report further reveals that while in the US, every city she was to perform in, she had to apply and obtain a separate US State Dept. waiver to do so.

It's clear, the US was just as ready to deport Cruz as they were allow her to stay.

The Herald report says Cruz was subject to this until 1965 when the US State Department allowed her permanent residency.

What changed? Again, according to declassified FBI documents, Cruz got prominent Cubans to vouch for her [none are named] and made three $92 payments to an anticommunist, anti-Revolution group in Miami for the explicit purpose "for the war against communist tyranny."

Ninety-two dollars in 1965 is over $800 in 2021.

This twist is interesting and one I'd like to imagine had to be very difficult for Cruz. 

As Cruz's family in Cuba has said, even after her mother's death in 1962, she continued to support her family with remittances, right up until her death in 2003.

Maybe she disassociated what those rifles could do to the family she had in enemy territory, so to speak. Of her siblings, only a younger sister came to the US; the others remained in Cuba, along with nieces, nephews, and cousins. Some even visited the US, but always returned.

Pedro Knight and Celia Cruz, circa 1965

Also, given the scrutiny Cruz was under from 1960 to 1965, her marriage to the Knight in 1962 when she did not know if she'd be allowed to remain in the US is curious. And Knight's claim from the Herald's first report he knew nothing of this situation is more unlikely.

Radical Conclusions

Unlike the Herald narrative which seeks to explain Cruz's PSP membership as simply a career move, I have other conclusions that make some overlooked historical points.

The communist parties, with and without the oversight of the one-time Communist International, were singularly at the forefront of progressive, anti-racist, pro-labor movements. We take these progressive movements for granted today, and the ways both capitalist parties have co-opted the narratives of these movements has been cunning and derailed those movements of backbone. They are performative today, and often linked in one way or another to the capitalist power structures. This was not so in those early days when a young, Black student teacher joined such a movement.

And it is not an overstatement to say that movements for workers, for Black liberation and civil rights, too briefly and unevenly for feminism, all originated from the radical roots of the communist parties.

The PSP is no exception to this rule. Cruz, a Black woman from a poor family, but who had trained to be a school teacher recognized the terrain of struggle in Cuba, and identified the PSP as the political entity wanting to upturn the existential threats to her working class as a whole and to Black people. She would have seen the PSP's work all over Cuba.

Whatever Cruz's feelings later in life, it diminishes her as a human being and a Black woman to deny her the possibility of this perspective, which the Celia Cruz Legacy Project, by stark omission, does.

To the controversy about Cruz being denied entry or if she even asked to return to Cuba, I have a theory. Given that she had been blacklisted and was in the early process to "clear her name," it is totally inconceivable she'd seek to travel back to Cuba, which had already declared the Revolution as "Marxist-Leninist." Such a move would have cast fresh suspicions upon her. 

I think her family in Cuba is correct that she never asked, and that Celia invented the story of being prohibited, like she did about the "one-way flight" as a story to show her anticommunist proclivities.

Also, interestingly, it was revealed [to me] after her death that she had been a longtime admirer and avid reader of Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings memoirs and other writings, and Angelou the same in return. In fact, Angelou pens the preface to Cruz's posthumously published autobiography. 

The intersection of these two Black women is fascinating grist to be studied. Angelou was not only a talented writer; she rubbed shoulders with and worked with some radical civil rights icons in the 60's, like the Communist Party USA's Vicki Garvin and former CPUSA organizer Audley "Queen Mother" Moore. She details these friendships and her leftist activism in her memoirs. 

These memoirs and this narrative would seem an odd choice for the rabid anticommunist we are told to believe Cruz was. But maybe that's why we'd never heard it mentioned.

Whenever Cruz came to perform in San Francisco, I was there. I even gave her a bouquet of flowers when she performed for the San Francisco Jazz Festival. But something I noted then, noted at her last appearance for a Telemundo homage, was Cruz's closing words at these concerts. She always thanked the hotel staff, the cooks, and the cleaning personnel who made the hotel and the events run.

While these words may mean nothing, the constant thought of the workers is a point I immediately connected when I learned of her earlier PSP activism.

Also, when Cruz was allowed into the US from Mexico as a Cuban exile, she cited her occupation as a "domestic," which would have been one of the only open to a Black woman with no English ability who was re-launching her career.

This investigation by the Miami Herald reflects the observable shifts on the ground in southern Florida. While the US establishment still clings to the Cuban reactionary community to sustain its backward narratives, the number of that older generation of Cubans is dying out and being replaced with younger Cubans for whom this story is a non-issue. After the initial waves in 1959, many left Cuba not because of communism but for economic reasons, and they arrive in a US where class struggles continue.

What are we to conclude about Cruz's character from her turnabout? Hollywood director and former CPUSA member Elia Kazan has remained a very controversial figure for throwing his former comrades under the bus in HUAC testimony. When a lifetime achievement award was maneuvered for him at the Oscars, many actors in the audience refused to stand or applaud. One film critic argued that such awards are for the totality of one's work, and that Kazan's career was built on the ruin of his comrades.

Horne's history is all but obscured, and we honor her.

Do we keep our seats and refuse applause to Celia Cruz? As a huge fan, I'd argue not. I would bring her bouquets still. But also, while she has been known as an anticommunist, this Black woman has used her career to raise money for AIDS and cancer research. And unlike Kazan, reports indicate she may not have been as virulent an anticommunist as she is made to appear. Not only the posthumous revelation of her admiration for Maya Angelou but also many Cuban musicians who remained loyal to the revolution have spoken of meeting her outside the US, in Europe and Latin America, and how receptive she is of them. She has also made a point of continuing to cover their music, their songs, bringing them more notoriety.

Unlike Horne, however, Cruz seems to have gone full throttle anticommunist with the rest of her life. Especially after the fall of the USSR, her antagonism to her homeland's economic project became more strident, even while her friends and family lived there. She could have just kept singing.

Nevertheless that she once joined a national movement connected to a global movement, that opposed racism, and stood for peace and social justice is worth including in anything that calls itself the Celia Cruz Legacy Project.

An American Myth

My expectations of "An American Factory" went from low to high, plateaued, then bottomed out.

I had first heard it was a project of Barack and Michelle Obama and imagined a cross between an ABC Afternoon Special and an episode of "Ellen." Whatever they had to say about factories or workers did not really rouse my interest given his eight years in office.

Barack and Michelle are our Harry and Meghan. Where Harry and Meghan abandoned the royals for a life in the suburbs of the Commonwealth, the Obamas abandoned the working class for foundations, girding the corporate agenda, and, in their words "telling stories."

With "An American Factory," they've helped to tell a whopper.

The Oscar award, I might say cynically, was the insiders giving their insiders a pat on the back.

A comrade posted Julia Reichert's acceptance speech at the Academy Awards. It was for "An American Factory." It was also the first time I had seen her name associated with the documentary. My adrenaline pulsed.

Reichert is a self-described red-diaper baby and a long-time documentary filmmaker that should have compared with Michael Moore. "Growing up Female," "Union Maids," and my first view of her work, "Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists," are among her works.

I expected a good story.

I got a good story. I also got a fairy tale requisite to the upholding of the American myth. This might be the price of Hollywood.

"An American Factory" accurately depicts the prejudices and shenanigans of the management class vis-a-vis the workers. It might have done better to show this power struggle on a macro level where Wall Street, our two corporate political parties which work for it, struggle to suppress any insurgency of the working class. But that might not have fit with the Obama's dream.

The trouble with the editing is it puts the two sides as almost interchangeable.

The scenes exposing the "chairman," and his underlings are surprisingly brutal and revealing how the corporate class exercises capitalism on us. One mid-level manager, fluent in Chinese, openly wishes to duct tape the mouths of his workers. Another brandishes how he has fakes a friendship with a worker whom he is also spying on: "he will not be here in two weeks."

Another scene where some consultants threaten that while the unionized workers may strike, they may also be replaced. This goes unchallenged.

In fact, much of these positions get challenged. But that would have been a different documentary, a better one

The People's Republic of China must be called in to question, but is not. Having followed with some effort the resistance movements in Africa to Chinese investment, the documentary was revelatory. With some effort, because a cadre of the radical left is on the ideological opposition to another cadre over whether China is socialist or not.

While many African governments are singing the praises of China, many civil society and grassroots organizations, as well as African trades unions and leftist, out-of-power parties are much more disparaging. The opponents detail what China is actually doing to its workers and communities.

Watching "An American Factory" put a vivid picture to the complaints of our African comrades. The multi-millionaire, Communist Party of China oligarchs come in wanting to discover us like European capitalism did.

I don't know how anyone can watch this documentary, or listen to those African dissident voices, and see anything socialist about modern-day China. The "chairman" is as crude an oligarch as Rockefeller or Vanderbilt must have been (or Bezos). And the vignette of his brief reminiscence of his childhood where he pretends to reflect upon his role is unimpressive.

I look forward to hearing the advocates of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" pull a rabbit out of this ass.

Without spoiling the pivotal ending, it was what followed that climax that made the documentary a true Hollywood concoction. The workers are shown exhibiting some sense of hopefulness for the American Dream. This is all they seem to have to hold on to. This is supposed to be the happy ending the pornographers want us to walk away with, not what worker's movements actually must do (Reichert did hint at this in her acceptance speech with her quote from Marx's Communist Manifesto).

Your comrades have been set up, injured, fired for being organizers to weaken their ranks; you lose, and your take away is to hold on what the American Dream signifies? No.

US Sen. Sherrod Brown irks the corporate management in front of them at the official opening of the factory. A nice parting shot at the end would have been his comment about how the chairman subverted all those workers, starting with the $12/hour wage. Further focus could have gone to the other struggle within the corporate class itself, one side more nativist and [white] nationalist, as exhibited by Donald Trump, and the other globalist. This might characterize the Republicans and Democrats themselves, too. And neither of these opponents within elite circles gives a damn about workers. But again, this would not be an Obama narrative.

Reichert took the money, produced an Academy Award-winning documentary that is worth watching, but the framing falsely places the chairman and UAW on an equal footing, and this is an American myth, not reality.

King exemplified today’s shift toward radical roots

The upcoming federal holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is an occasion to remember the movement in which he labored so prominently. This particular election year, King and that movement strike an even stronger relevance. While it is unfortunate the country finds itself divided by political differences, it is encouraging the left has rediscovered its radical roots and is reaching for them with less hesitation. Not only is a socialist heading the pack of presidential candidates, but his place in this campaign has pushed to the left a Democratic Party that has gotten too cozy with Wall Street and too far from the masses of workers and the poor.

King would have understood this shift, because in the relatively short time he was engaged in the civil rights movement, before he was assassinated, he exemplified this shift.

The civil rights movement began long before King, going at least as far back as the 20's and 30's. It is important while we honor the man that we pay respect to the radical roots of the movement that produced him. In doing so, we better prepare ourselves for the real areas in which we must struggle.
It's worthwhile to review some of the history. While the two main Democratic and Republican Parties were either passively supporting or silently indifferent to the cause of workers and Black struggle, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was at the forefront, sending its organizers - Black and white - all over the South, to Northern industrial cities, the West Coast, and to the territory of Hawaii.

In the South where King was born, the CPUSA organizers faced a barrage of hostility from the racist establishment. Some were murdered. Some, like CPUSA members Dorothy and Louis Burnham, fled. Others, like James and Esther Cooper Jackson, Ed and Augusta Strong, and Sallye Bell Davis stayed - all played a role in founding the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), a front group for the CPUSA, where activists like Rosa Parks were trained.

The subsequent Montgomery bus boycott that brought King to prominence was mobilized largely by Black women workers like Parks. These Black women were not simply tired. They were tired from overwork and underpay but also tired of US apartheid. They were also organizers.

Parks credits CPUSA member, Mildred McAdory, with the bus boycott's success. In 1941, more than a decade before Parks' arrest, McAdory was herself arrested in Birmingham for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, which launched a legal fight by the CPUSA against Southern apartheid.
Parks and McAdory were not alone in this struggle. Claudia Jones, Louise Thompson Patterson, Lena Horne, Beah Richards (actress who played Sidney Poitier's mother in the 1968 film "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner), Audley "Queen Mother" Moore, etc., were all Black women and one time Party members.

The works of SNYC and the CPUSA  are pivotal to understanding King and his own evolving commitments. These works extended to Hawaii where the Honolulu chapter of the NAACP was disbanded because it had attracted members of the Communist Party, like UH chemist Charles Fujimoto, educators John and Aiko Reinecke, and Ewart and Eugenia Guinier (the Guiniers were the parents of legal scholar Lani Guinier).

In the brief years of his activism, King went from supporting a bus boycott, fighting to end Jim Crow, an advocate for civil rights, and then to speak to broader, working class solidarity against poverty, war, imperialism, and capitalism. He made this progression with Communists at his side. Men like Bayard Rustin, who had joined the Young Communists League and helped conceive the March on Washington in 1941, and Jack O'Dell, another CPUSA member who was also director of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

So with King we have a man, but we must also appreciate and study the movement. The contexts that nourished and produced him and all these activists must be celebrated. There's still much work to be done. As Sallye Bell Davis' own daughter reminded us: the struggle is not a marathon but a relay race, where we are obliged to take these issues towards promising futures as far as we can, then hand off the batons. Davis' daughter is, of course, Angela Davis, who joined the CPUSA in 1968.

Let's mark this day by picking up the baton.


[This article first appeared as a My Turn column in the January 25 edition of West Hawaii Today]