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CCDS Stands with the Cuban People

All Out to Defend the Cuban Revolution

November 14,2021

On November 15^th – the day that Cuba opens its schools and borders following the months-long pandemic – the U.S. government has engineered protests that are intended to subvert the economy and overthrow the Cuban government.

 

The operative organizing the protests through a Facebook page called Archipelago is Yunior García Aguilera, a Cuban playwright who has been exposed as a long-time U.S. agent. In an explosive interview on Cuban television, Dr. Carlos Vazquez Gonzalez revealed himself as a Cuban State Security Agent known as Fernando who has been functioning for more than 25 years in the circles of counter revolutionary Cubans. He has evidence to prove Garcia’s links to the U.S. government and the anti-Cuban mafia in Miami, also funded by the U.S. (See the report in Gramna: https://en.granma.cu/cuba/2021-11-05/agent-fernando-exposes-us-trained-counterrevolutionary)

 

The counter-revolutionary scheme, exposed by Dr. Gonzalez, is also connected to far right and fascist organizations internationally – and has been in the works for many years.

 

No country in the world allows its citizens to ally with foreign governments to overthrow its own government.

 

The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism stands with the Cuban people and demands that the U.S. cease its subversive plans which are being paid for with U.S. taxpayer money in the millions of dollars funneled through NGO organizations and media outlets.

 

The cruel and inhumane, illegal economic blockade of Cuba and the additional brutal sanctions of the Trump administration are meant to inflict maximum suffering on the Cuban people in the hopes they will join a counterrevolutionary protest movement. The overthrow of the socialist government of Cuba has long been the goal of U.S. corporate interests and the far right who want to regain what they lost when the US-supported dictator Batista was overthrown in 1959.

 

Public opinion polls show that the U.S. people, by a large majority, support a return to diplomacy and a path towards normalization of relations with Cuba. President Biden was elected with a promise to repeal the onerous sanctions of the Trump administration and return to the diplomatic path set by his predecessor in the White House. We are waiting for him to live up to his campaign promise.

 

President Biden, we demand you lift the sanctions and end the economic warfare waged on Cuba, end the travel ban that prevents people to people contact, and normalize relations. To that end, CCDS urges its members and friends to:

1)    Call your Member of Congress, and ask them to sign on to a Dear Colleague letter to President Biden issued by Reps. McGovern (D-MA), Bobby Rush (D-IL), Barbara Lee (D-CA), and Gregory Meeks (D-NY). It asks President Biden to change U.S. policy towards Cuba and return to diplomacy including the lifting of the embargo. See letter here: letterhttps://bit.ly/2YHcBAu  

2)    Help mobilize and join protests of U.S. policy in solidarity with Cuba on November 15^th.

3)    Continue to build support for legislation in Congress to end the embargo and travel ban – and make plans to visit Cuba.

The U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan should force a reckoning with a long history of military intervention.

By David Bacon
Foreign Policy in Focus | August 30, 2021
View at Foreign Policy in Focus

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) was the main speaker at the rally of over 200,000 people who marched up Market Street in San Francisco to protest the Bush administration’s war on terror and threatened invasion of Iraq. (© 2001, David Bacon)
Many in the U.S. media continue to credit the good intentions of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, while belaboring its failure over 20 years to achieve any of them. But to say that the United States wanted a progressive, liberal democratic, and secular government in Afghanistan can only be believed by those who refuse to remember what Washington did when Kabul actually had one.

In the days following the attacks on September 11, the United States was called on to declare war against an enemy those in Congress who voted for it couldn’t even name. Policymakers asked American citizens to sacrifice civil liberties for security and give the military money that was so desperately needed to solve the country’s social problems.

Congress did those things with only one dissenting vote: Barbara Lee’s. Now it’s time to look at historical truth, to understand how the United States got this 20-year war, with its ignominious end at the Kabul airport, and how the overarching framework of U.S. policy was responsible for creating it.

Other countries facing similar traumatic changes wrenching them from the past have pioneered a way to examine their own history. El Salvador, Guatemala, South Africa, and elsewhere established truth commissions to probe into and acknowledge each country’s real history. Such public acknowledgement is a necessary step towards change.

The United States is no stranger to this process. After the end of the Vietnam War (or the American War, as the Vietnamese call it), Senator Frank Church held watershed hearings that brought some of the Cold War’s ghosts to public attention. But the process was cut short, the policies responsible for Cold War atrocities never fully questioned, and as a result, the ghosts were never laid to rest. Those ghosts still haunt the United States, and in Afghanistan hundreds of thousands died for them.

The massive social upheaval at home following the Vietnam War- and the deaths of over a million Vietnamese and 40,000 US soldiers-forced Senator Church’s examination. Before the people of this and other countries pay a similar price in yet another war, the United States need to reexamine that history.

The roots of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington lie in the Cold War. Without truly ending it and untangling its consequences, there will be no security for us.

… Full Story at David Bacon’s Blog Site

By David Bacon
CFT United, 5/25/21
https://www.cft.org/article/job-security-still-table-uc-lecturers

All photos © David Bacon, from strikes by lecturers, clericals, technical workers and others at the University of California Berkeley campus, 2002 and 2003.

When lecturers at the University of California fought in 1984 to win recognition for their union and the right to bargain, their biggest issue was job security. The university had a barbaric rule – lecturers were automatically terminated at the end of three to eight years of teaching, depending on the department. If, indeed, they lasted that long. At UC Santa Cruz, lecturer Roz Spofford proudly told her colleagues, “Our local was the first to fight the ‘four year’ rule. With AFT support, we were able to save the jobs of lecturers statewide.”

These contingent faculty members voted for the union by an overwhelming majority in one of the first elections held under the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act. They then went into negotiations. It took two years to win agreement from the university on their first contract, and its signal achievement was ending the termination rule.

UC labor activist Margy Wilkinson, addressing rally of UC students, staff and lecturers.

Other contracts followed. After strikes on some campuses in 2002 and a three-year campaign, the union won continuing 3-year appointments for lecturers who complete six years of teaching and pass an exam, jokingly called by some “passing through the eye of the needle.” The university has to renew the appointments so long as classes are available the lecturer can teach.

Today, however, job security is still the most important issue for lecturers, especially for those still trying to reach the six-year goal. Only 7.8 percent of lecturers since 2003 have had continuing appointments. According to John Branstetter, president of the UC-AFT chapter at UCLA, it is difficult for lecturers to reach continuing status, because the closer they get to the six-year goal, the likelier it is they won’t be rehired.

The solution put forward by UC-AFT is a system to protect the job rights of lecturers as they continue teaching, especially their right to be rehired from one year to the next. But the unwillingness of the University of California administration to recognize job security as a key issue is preventing agreement on a new contract, although the old one expired over a year ago.

Full Story Here