 Okay. Welcome to what the F is going on in Latin America, CodePink's weekly YouTube program of hot news out of Latin America and the Caribbean. In partnership with Friends of Latin America and Task Force on the Americas, we broadcast every Wednesday for 30 p.m. Pacific, 7 30 p.m. Eastern on CodePink's YouTube channel. Sunday, July 11, the world witnessed anti-government protests in Cuba with a large counter-protest response from pro-government supporters. Protests erupted as a result of a week of limited electricity, 12 hours per day, lack of food, fuel, and other essentials. Absent from mainstream media coverage was discussion of the long-term effects of a 60-year embargo on Cuba led by the United States. An embargo expanded during the Trump administration, which included the prohibition of purchasing diesel and petroleum, which fuel electrical generators and all forms of transportation. I want to welcome our very special guest this evening, our guest and friend, Ajammu Baraka, of Black Alliance for Peace, to discuss recent events in Cuba, but also to talk with us about the disproportionate suffering in bargos, sanctions, unilateral coercive measures. They're called many things. The UN refers to them as unilateral coercive measures. That these measures place disproportionately upon Afro-descendant peoples of Cuba, Haiti, Colombia, and a good part of the Caribbean, Caribbean island states as well. So welcome, Ajammu. Really wonderful to have you with us this evening. I'm so happy you could join us. Thank you so much for having me, Terry. Looking forward to it. So let's talk a bit about what happened in Cuba on Sunday. We heard throughout the U.S. mainstream, Western mainstream media that the country had erupted in protests throughout, anti-government protests, people tired of lack of essentials and no electricity. But there's more to that story than what the U.S. media wants us to understand. Well, exactly. I mean, it's more to the story of why Cubans are facing the kind of material deprivation that they're facing that's being talked about in the U.S. and European press. And that is related to the murderous sanctions, the sixth decade embargo on the people and the state of Cuba, all in an effort to try to suffocate their revolutionary project. So the deprivations that the Cuban people have suffered have been long-standing. And even the intensification of those deprivations as a consequence of the so-called maximum pressure implied by the Trump administration and continued with the Biden administration, of course, a Biden administration that pretended they were going to address some of those issues imposed by the Trump administration and reverse those policies. But of course, that didn't happen. What really was really important and interesting and people need to keep this in mind is that, again, these material deprivations and even the intensification of them are long-standing. The issue is, was it triggered just what happened in the last couple of weeks with some of the outages of electric or was it more nefarious forces in play that helped to facilitate and organize these demonstrations along with a very welled, oiled, fairly sophisticated media campaign to try to present an image of Cuba and a narrative that in fact, perhaps maybe attempted to lay the groundwork for some kind of external intervention. So it's a lot to unpackage with the situation in Cuba and with these in relative terms minor demonstrations. No one talked about the possibility of a quote-unquote color revolution in the US when millions of people took to the streets during the so-called George Floyd demos. But yet we're supposed to be led to believe that the situation in Cuba is so fragile that a few hundred people demonstrating in Cuba, one represents some kind of massive rejection of their project and then secondly might lead to the overthrow of the Cuban process. That's absolutely absurd. It happens everywhere, every country, in every community where people do get tired of certain situations. I mean that's a situation that happens across the world. These people have had a maximum pressure campaign placed upon them by the Trump administration that as you mentioned the Biden administration has not even insinuated in the least that it will reverse and of course Biden was vice president under Obama when there was a relaxing of US foreign policy towards Cuba. So I think people really had hoped for something different, perhaps incorrectly but nevertheless. But people have suffered here in the United States, I say here I'm sitting in Mexico and you're in Colombia, suffered this COVID-19 pandemic. The Cubans as well, the Cubans have been helping people throughout the world with their Henry Reeves medical brigades but they've been suffering the effects of a pandemic. They've been suffering maximum pressure sanctions against them which not only affects now their inability to import diesel to run their electrical generators but transportation fuel which not only affects commuters and personal travel but also food transportation and other personal goods and so who would not be frustrated? Just because you're frustrated with those situations did not necessarily mean you are frustrated to the point of overthrowing your government. It doesn't necessarily equate to the same and I think that's what that's the narrative that the US would like to continue to propagate. Of course and you know when we attempt to try to understand what's happening in Cuba, I think you're right that there will be frustration, there has been frustration with the kinds of material realities that people have been forced to deal with in that country. But you know what Terry? It always though goes back to the issue of politics. When you look at for example the special period in Cuba right after the implosion of the Soviet Union and the dire economic conditions that people face in Cuba. One would think that if the motivation for resistance for protests was just a consequence of material deprivation then people would have went to the streets. But that didn't really happen. The situation with these protests to me is important for us to we can identify some of these issues but I think we have to kind of unpackage the politics that are involved here. Politics that can't even be completely understood by just limiting the analysis to Cuba. You know I see the situation in Cuba and the fact that it's clear there's legitimate concerns and legitimate resistance that people are engaged in. But I think some of that resistance has been basically manipulated by forces that they have no understanding of in my opinion. And that those forces that are helping to manipulate the situation in Cuba also those same forces that are manipulating the situation in Haiti, in Colombia, and throughout our America's region. And I see the kind of subversion and political manipulation is taking place primarily orchestrated by the US with their European allies. Not so much as a reflection of strength but of a conclusion that they have come to that they have an opportunity to try to advance and create chaos. But that conclusion is also motivated by a sense of almost desperation that the contradictions that have been exposed in their own societies regarding the limitations of their economic and political order is such that they are challenged to try to maintain to manage perceptions in their society. So diverting attention to the so-called global south, making a while comparisons to suggest that things are so much more better in the in the northern countries where people are suffering horrendous levels of unemployment and underemployment where we have in the US the largest number of people who have unnecessarily died from COVID-19, the exposure of a healthcare system in the US that was completely unable to deal with the crisis of COVID. And the obvious revelations that this global capitalist order is unable to meet the material needs of the people not only in the US but globally. So there's an ideological and political struggle afoot and the situation in Cuba is part of that. The crisis we see unfolding in Haiti, the revolts against neoliberalism in Colombia, all of these elements are linked and we've got to have a framework that helps us to understand those connections and those linkages or we might get confused about what's unfolding in places like in Cuba and making a mistake just on the surface in terms of trying to understand what's really happening. You mentioned Haiti and a week ago today, today's Wednesday, so last Wednesday, we woke up here in Mexico City to the assassination of Jovenel Moise, the I don't want to call him president because his constitutional term expired and he remained in office with the blessing of the United States. The United, the Biden administration overtly said they would recognize him as president through December of this year. Do you, so his assassination was, I have to say for me, was quite shocking to wake up to that last week. Do you feel, see, or maybe you're even hearing, a relationship beyond systemic, is there, are the incidents in Haiti last week and the protests in Cuba on Sunday directly related? Is there, I guess I want to say a plot or are these two separate incidences that are resultant of the same failures of neoliberalism? And Haiti, my God, has been 300 years' failure of capitalism and neoliberal suffering. Exactly. They are separate incidents but yet linked, linked in the sense that they are part of the of the regional colonial capitalist order. The relationship between the U.S. and these various states are such that the conditions in these various states is a consequence of that dependent, that subordinate relationship between the U.S. and these various states and the domination of the U.S. over the states, even states like Cuba that have been struggling for more than 60 years to try to build an alternative to the colonial capitalist system. So what we had in Haiti is a very interesting thing because when you look at, for example, the kinds of sanctimonious commentary regarding Cuba and the nonsensical positions taken by some of the politicians in the U.S., including Joe Biden, who has the nerve to lecture or attempt to lecture the Cubans on how they're supposed to relate to protest, and protesters that you can compare the relative silence and even support given to Jovenel Moise in Haiti to the uprising that he faced once the green light was given to him by the Biden administration to stay in power past his term on February the 7th. I mean, the hypocrisy is absolutely obvious. There was no call to, for the U.S. to step in and save the Haitian people who were being brutalized by Moise. And the same can be said when you look at what unfolded and still in some ways unfolding in Colombia, where you had U.S.-trained police forces and military who have been accused of engaging in massive human rights violations without any, without with impunity, no effective investigations and prosecutions to try to account for the more than 70 people who ended up losing their lives during this national strike. So the political agenda is absolutely clear, that there's no concern about democracy and human rights when it comes from the U.S. and the Western allies. These are all about, these are all about geopolitical interests, geo-strategic interests, and issues of human rights and democracy are only just instruments that they use to try to evoke support for the interventionist policies in those countries. So that's why I was saying earlier that we have to keep this stuff in perspective, make these linkages and understand the terms of the class struggle that we see unfolding in these places. All of this is a consequence of the deepening crisis of the colonial capitalist system. I want to come back to class struggle in a minute because I think that's key and it has a lot to do with this, what in the States is referred to as identity politics. But before we talk about that, you mentioned the destruction of economies and let's talk about what's happened specifically. We're also seeing this unfold, we've also watched this unfold in Venezuela since December of 2014 as well. But in Haiti, the many of the domestic agricultural crops were destroyed with the importation of U.S. agricultural crops. So then you have a country that becomes dependent on many, for many items on imports, but food specifically. And in Haiti, it was pigs and rice that were, those agricultural crops were destroyed and now they're imported from the United States. That puts a nation and its people in a really vulnerable position, specifically with the United States controlling imports and global currency and and overnight trading by the banks. So you have countries that the U.S. comes in to manipulate the market to open, I think the term is open markets is what U.S. capitals like to use, open markets. And it ends up making the domestic population very, very vulnerable. And that's a big, a big weakness in Haiti at the moment. Well, I will, for more than just the moment, for a couple centuries. Exactly, exactly. And also the reality that you see there in Mexico. I mean, the policies of neoliberalism over the last 40 years have been absolutely devastating for the peoples of the Americas and really for the entire globe. Because as you indicated in your question, one of the major elements of the neoliberal project was the imposition of the West and Western capital on these various nation-states to force them to open up their economies to foreign investment. We say foreign intervention, really. And what you described that happened in Haiti in terms of the almost complete transformation of Haitian agriculture, where Haiti was a state that despite its massive poverty, it still was a nation that had land distribution to a certain extent that allowed people to be food sovereign. Okay. All of that was completely gutted by the policies of neoliberalism that opened up the economy. The U.S. went in and forced the Haitian government to kill all of its pigs. They flooded the market with cheap products like rice and other items that drove Haitians off the land and into the cities and into these special export zones, these sweatshops, where they were forced to work to sew up and create clothes that people, including the working class back in northern countries, were able to afford because they were so cheap. So this is a story that we see in Haiti. It's a story that we saw in Mexico when U.S. agricultural interventions in Mexico drove people off the land and on a trek to the north. This is the contradiction of the neoliberal policies that have created 3.5 billion people who now live in abject poverty. This is the consequence of the colonial capitalist system. This didn't just result because of people's bad decision-making. This resulted from this parasitic relationship between the colonial capitalists in the northern countries and the rest of the world. And this is what we have to understand always because what happens is that the colonial capitalists and their media propagandists will try to make us believe that these issues we see are as a consequence of the cultural deficiencies, the inability to govern in these countries. And if you keep that at that level, not only would you be confused, you end up allowing yourself to be used and manipulated and support the interventions by your own governments. And that's what we have to try to draw the line. Well, that's where the blinders are when you see country Cuba having created a different model, having staying outside of that U.S. neoliberal model, Nicaragua to a certain extent, and they of course have 95% food sovereignty, they're sitting pretty nicely despite the attack that's going on against them right now from the United States. And it's going to get more, it's going to intensify before the presidential elections there in November. So you see and as you opened with this comment that the finger pointing towards countries that have the U.S. model or at the very least want to embrace South the South, a South the South model, a multilateral model versus a unilateral model, those countries Cuba, well, in the hemisphere of the Americas, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Bolivia back to that model, hopefully Brazil next year, Peru, the end of this month, assuming the OAS allows Castillo to be inaugurated. So it's fascinating and horrifying simultaneously that the narrative is so controlled by Western media that to not look internally at the dysfunctions of the United States, but to freely point the finger at what these other countries are doing wrong. And I think that has a lot to do with what you brought up as as class struggle in the United States, we don't talk about class struggle. We are so focused on identity politics, who's doing what to whom and where and when and in this personal procurement of one's political experience that we don't talk about the common thread. And that being class that the class struggle, and that it is the neoliberal model that exists in the United States as well, that is failing its own citizens. But there's this, you know, everybody stays in their silos, so to speak, because of the identity politics. How do we get beyond that? It's really hard. You're so articulate at it, and your work is framed completely around that issue. But how do we get out of those silos so that people understand in the States, what's happening to them is the same as the brown Spanish speaking people to the South? It's a very, very complicated issue, Terry, as you know. And when we started talking about and looking at issues of class and race, in particular, as they express themselves in places like the US, it's very, very complicated. Because we tend to, we operate in frameworks in which you know, we can be very confused by various experiences. For example, you know, we we have to recognize that, that why there's some common interest between the working classes, the labor classes in the US, and in Western Europe, and those labor classes in the Global South. We also have to recognize, too, that there are some material differences. There's a reason why we have a social imperialist left and a working class in the US. Why? Because they have, to a certain extent, benefited from the materiality from this unequal relationship between the Northern countries and the Global South. And we have to recognize that. We have to understand how the issue of race has been used and propagated to not only confuse people, but to prevent us from understanding, too, how race and class have conspired together, to explain how and why elements of the white working class will continue to identify with and collaborate with the ruling elements in the US and against their own objective ventures. So it becomes very, very complicated, especially to when you have some people who are organizing themselves based on their understanding of their particular history, as the colonized people, even within the confines of the US, who then have to run up against, you know, sort of mechanical and understandings of what race and class is and the accused of perpetuating division, even those already divisioned among the working class. So it becomes such a complicated issue. The way in which we get around some of that, though, in the short term, in my opinion, and how we approach it in the Black Alliance of Peace, is to try to build alliances among people who are colonized, who are part of the working class, to identify and work with our allies, who may be, you know, European workers and others, who recognize that, you know, there's a primary contradiction. That primary contradiction right now is with this global colonial capitalist system that's killing all of us. And we can keep the focus on that. Then that provides a basis for us to devise some common political agendas and programs, while we simultaneously have to deal with some of our own internal contradictions around issues of race and white supremacy, and how easy it is, for example, for people in the US and in the North, to accept that they have some kind of God-given right to intervene into the affairs of other nations. That's when Mark or Rubio and others talk about intervention in Cuba, you know, they don't want to raise the question, what gives you the right to intervene, okay? What gives them the right is this sort of unacknowledged and undiscussed notion of white privilege, white power, and the right to be able to determine the political leadership of people around the world, and no one sees the contradiction. That is part of the challenge we have politically in the country. That's something that I can personally attach to that. I mean, that is something maybe not so much anymore, because I haven't raised any young children, but for me personally, those concepts were put on the hard drive in public education in the United States, in kindergarten, when you're five years old, that all starts being put on you, you know, how the history of the United States that you're taught and that you learn about and all of it, the whole paradigm. So it is hard to undo. I feel like a lot of us, particularly raised during the First Cold War, we've spent the majority of our adult lives kind of undoing. We spend so much time undoing, it's hard to even start moving forward, because there's so much to unlearn before you can start relearning. But it's just, you know, this notion of believing. And we saw this with Kamala Harris, you know, in Mexico and Guatemala earlier this summer. This is a young woman whose parents were migrants from Jamaica who stood and spoke in front of people in Central America and told them, you know, don't come to the United States. You have to stay here. Well, where's that coming from? She's not, you know, this, I mean, I guess, I'm not sure how to correctly say this or how to articulate this, that this notion of white supremacy is, has now expanded where this face of neoliberalism with the Biden administration is no longer simply white men. It's men and women of other races as well. And so the face that neoliberalism hasn't changed. So only the face of it has changed. And I think that was so clear with Kamala Harris's visit to Central America. Well, it was clear, Tara, even before, before that, it was, it was clear to many of us, even during the regime of Barack Hussein Obama, that this was the culmination of a process that really began in the 1970s as part of the of the counter-insurgents, the counter-revolutionary assault on the Black liberation movement within the U.S., with one of the main objectives being the break it down, any kind of psychological and emotional resistance and sets of difference that the Black people had vis-a-vis the American national state. And so, so what we, what we see in the U.S. is this a manifestation of the assumptions of white supremacy, of white, of superiority, of white civilization, white culture normalized to the extent that that even talked about is just, it just is, okay? And so this kind of normalization of white supremacy, this notion that the U.S. is the shining city on the hill, that it is, as Barack Obama talked about, the exceptional nation that Trump talked about as the great nation that needs to be rebuilt, being brought back. This is something that is just common sense now. And so one can be a white supremacist, like one can be a patriarch and a sexist and be a woman. One can be a personal color and be a white supremacist. The ideological element of this is what we look at, okay? But we also look at the structural element that white supremacy has clear expressions and structures and institutions in, like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, like the hegemony of the dollar, okay? Like the national security apparatus and the multinational corporations. And these are the structures of white power. So, you know, when people talk about, you know, let's get rid of these symbols of white power and they talk about things like the confederacy, we understand that. But then some of us raised the question, if you were interested in symbols of white power, why are you limiting that to just the confederacy? Are you assuming, are you suggesting that the U.S. flag is supposed to be a flag of liberation? If that's the case, then basically you're not on the same side of us because we don't see it that way. We see this as the continuation of a settler colonial state put in place in 17 by 1791 that has been consistent and has proven itself that U.S. nationalism is in fact, and patriotism is in fact, white nationalism. And we can't embrace that. So, 1791, what year was it? When did Thomas Jefferson have his sights on Cuba as a state? I mean, Cuba has been in the crosshairs in the sights of the United States from the beginning of the nation. And here they still are. I mean, I believe, you can correct me if I'm wrong, I believe it was Thomas Jefferson who really overtly articulated having Cuba as part of the United States. And of course, it's a magnificent naval base. And is today, nevertheless, despite that it didn't happen during Thomas Jefferson's era, but he saw it as that. And then in 1898, it included incomes Puerto Rico from Spain and Guam as well. You can really see this whole Monroe Doctrine manifest destiny, white supremacist, colonialist doctrine. It's been there from the very start. And it really hasn't. From the very start. Yeah, I mean, look, to the very beginning, because basically once the U.S., once the sons and daughters of the colonialist bourgeoisie freed themselves from the control of England, they were then open, they were then free to, in fact, engage in a manifest destiny, murderous ramp across the U.S., the territory that became the U.S. So even though they saw the possibility of building an empire even beyond the U.S., they first had the major objective, which was to conquer the land mass that came to be known as the U.S. And so their desires for land beyond the U.S. wasn't, they were able to delay that for another almost 100 years with the Spanish-American, so-called Spanish-American War, because they had another conquering to do. So this was the motivation they had to free themselves, and this was the reality that they engaged in, in building their empire on the U.S. territory. So yes, white supremacy is at the core of this, violence is at the core of this project, making money is at the core of it, and that is the continuity that has to be disrupted. If we're going to be able to build a new kind of society in the U.S. and really a new world, it is what motivates today U.S. policies in Cuba, in Haiti, in Venezuela. They still believe and see these nations and peoples as part of their empire, and they'll do whatever they can do to try to maintain control of this crumbling empire. So I wonder if we could wrap up with a couple of things. I could talk to you all evening, actually, about this one. Earlier in the conversation we were talking about the neoliberal model. You made a reference to Mexico, NAFTA, North American pre-trade agreement in Honduras after the U.S. led coup of 2009 in which the democratically elected president, Mel Zelaya, was ousted, and, oh my gosh, Lobo was president, and then succeeded by Juan Orlando Hernandez. In 2009, the U.S. installed government in Honduras announced Honduras is open for business, and that meant a lot of things would start, started happening as in, as in Haiti, the destruction of domestic agriculture, water rights for huge infrastructure projects, hydroelectric projects specifically, but also on the Caribbean coast of Honduras is this land grabbing that is disproportionately affecting the Garifana community, which are people of African descent. And so I'd like as to just close in reiterating to the audience how much of this, yes, white supremacy and with, you know, a physical white appearance, but also it's a, you know, it's a paradigm that people live in regardless of their skin color, but it's a, this model disproportionately affects people of African descent in the hemisphere and really across the world, quite frankly, but, you know, we're focused today on Latin America and the Caribbean. It's a huge disproportionate number of African descendants that are affected by this model. Well, it really is. I mean, throughout the Americas, the issue of African descendants, African people and the issue of the indigenous still is at the center of politics in this region. And as you said, the Garifana people in Honduras who have lived on those territories in those territories for quite some time, relatively unencumbered even though they always had to face the violence and intrusions from the Honduran state and private sectors, recently has been a tremendous assault on their autonomy, on their ability to maintain their cultural integrity and their physical presence in their territories. And it intensified after the U.S. green lighted the coup in 2009. So, right, this is disproportionate and this is the element that many people in the U.S. don't seem to understand that when you have Biden and the Democrat hypocrites talk about Black Lives Matter, that is all BS because the Black Lives Matter, they'll matter in Honduras, they will matter in Venezuela, they will matter in Cuba, they will matter in Nicaragua. We all know it's absolute nonsense and that's why we have to try to make people understand so that they don't allow themselves to be used and to give support to the U.S. policies to try to maintain the hegemony in this region by any means necessary. So let me ask you in closing, what can activists watching our conversation this evening, what can they do? Where can they start or continue to work? Well, one thing that we have to do, activists in the U.S. have to do is stop providing aggressive and love cover to U.S. imperialism, reject the notion of humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect. It is a 21st century manifestation of this BS white man's burden. Squash white saviorism, put a break on U.S. intervention. You have no right to be able to not support a project in the South when that project is in the crosshairs of U.S. intervention. You cannot allow yourself to give cover, audiological cover by pointing out the contradictions in those countries. They all have contradictions and we can talk about those. But when the U.S. is attempting to intervene, they're not intervening because of any kind of benevolence. They're intervening because they're involved in a global class struggle. And you are collaborating with that agenda when you sit around and pontificate about these alleged contradictions and shortcomings of these projects. So stop that, stop collaborating with your ruling class and get into an organization. Struggle, join the black lines of peace. For example, tomorrow we're organizing a demo at the State Department beginning at 12 o'clock to demand there's no intervention in Haiti and Cuba. Get into the streets, get into the organization, fight with us and that against us. So let me just tell the audience that you can find out more about this action tomorrow in Washington D.C. at blackalinesforpeace.org and dot com, sorry, dot com. Yep, I knew that. But also you also have a solidarity network that people can become part of. Exactly, exactly. If you're not African and we refer it to all black people, Africans, you definitely, we want you to work with us and to join the alliance and you can join that, you can do that, you join the black alliance of peace, solidarity network. They do some fantastic work, all advancing the overall project and program of the alliance that they're taking to leave, for example, on their work on Afghanistan. So yes, please consider joining us. We're trying to build a movement, a powerful anti-war, anti-imperialist movement in this country. And we can only do that when we get ourselves organized and build the kind of powerful coalition that we have to build. And we all could be part of that process, live up to our responsibilities in the global north. Well, this is one of the things I love about you and your work in Black Alliance for Peace is that you're so inclusive. And that, and I just think that is, for me personally, it's extraordinarily appealing and necessary. And that's the direction we all need to be going. And I'm just so happy for your work. And I'm so happy you had had time to join us this evening. It's always wonderful to be in conversation with you. I hope you come back and good luck tomorrow with your event in Washington, DC. And I'm thankful for the time tonight to connect all the dots between Haiti, between Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, and of course all emanating from the United States. So thank you again for your time. I really appreciate it. Always wonderful to talk with you. And I just want to thank our audience for joining us this evening and to remind you that you're watching what the F is going on in Latin America. We broadcast on Code Pink YouTube every Wednesday for 30pm Pacific, 730pm Eastern. And also don't forget to catch Code Pink Radio every Thursday morning, 11am Eastern, 8am Pacific, simulcasting on WBAI out of New York City and WPFW out of Washington, DC. So thank you, everyone, and we'll see you next week. Thank you.