CUBA CRUISE

We’re back. Gail and I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to take a one-week cruise around Cuba, stopping for a day at each of five different ports. It was a Canadian-Greek ship, the Louis Cristal, making its last Cuba Cruise of the season, probably the first to include a small but significant number of passengers from the United States.

We’re so glad we did it, even though the heat and long, slow lines at immigration were pretty taxing for this old man. I’ve always wanted to set foot in brave “little” Cuba, to feel its legendary warmth, creativity, and musicality. It was only a week, but one of the joys of a lifetime.

I’m not tempted to expand this eye-blink of a trip into an “expert” commentary on Cuba. Our interaction with Cubans on the ship and in a couple of the towns was more than we anticipated. It was friendly, frank and relaxed. Frustration was openly expressed, especially with restricted Internet access and arbitrary authority over permission to travel. There was deep pride in culture and country, and in the fact that government cares about people, about education, health, and making sure that food supplies are available to the poor.

What shines through all the negative propaganda in our country about Cuba is the miracle of its survival and its remarkable record of humanitarian contributions. Most recently, Cuban doctors and health personnel led the world in direct response to Ebola in the most ravished African countries.

A personal little side-story added to my experience on this trip. Way back around 1950, when I was chair of the Labor Youth League, I met the leader of the Cuban youth movement at a meeting in Mexico City. It was only for a few days, but we hit it off and shared a lot of exciting conversation about our hopes for a better world. His name was Flavio Bravo. We were never to meet again.  

I Googled Flavio before the cruise and found that he had been a leader in Cuba’s mission to save Angola’s independence against a contra-style mercenary war. He later became the head of the Cuban National Assembly. As far as I could tell he was still alive, although he had to be a nonagenarian like me. I was hopeful, and I wrote him a letter that a tour leader said she would try to have delivered.

A couple of days later, a guide in Santiago de Cuba mentioned having served in Angola. We talked. He said he served with “our leader”, Flavio Bravo. He described him in the warmest terms, the way I remembered him so many years past. He told me Flavio’s parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, among those who brought ideas of Socialism to the Americas.

Sadly, Google’s story was incomplete. Flavio died a few years ago. My new Cuban friend took my sympathy note to give to Flavio’s family.

I can’t leave off without mentioning the fellow-American passengers who became our good buddies along the way. Surprising and so satisfying that friendship can blossom in just a few days.

                         

FROM HUBRIS TO HUMILIATION

Remarkable! 

There could be no clearer demonstration of the destructive psychology of “American exceptionalism” than the way the negotiations with Iran are being viewed.

Of course, the most egregious attitude, defiant of constitutional precedent and contemptuous of international law, is in the letter of almost the entire GOP Senate majority to the Iranian government. What the GOP ignores completely, the media treats as an occasional footnote: France, Germany, Russia, China and Britain (the UN Security Council +1) are vital participants in the negotiations and any hoped for agreement. They too, not just Obama, would be wiped away by “the stroke of a pen” with which the outlaw Senators promise to trash any agreement.

From hubris to humiliation, the Senators had to be enlightened by the Iranian foreign minister. He suggested that they misread and defied US constitutional proscriptions about the conduct of foreign policy. No surprise that they also had to be informed about international law. Apparently it doesn’t exist for them: war is the preferable alternative to diplomacy and international cooperation.

Meanwhile Democrats, including more than a few who have gone along with efforts to sabotage the Iran negotiations, are offended by the brazen partisan behavior of Netanyahu, Boehner and now the GOP Senators. It’s time to see this issue as far beyond petty politics. It’s a matter of war or peace, one battle in the existential fight for the future.

BIBI'S FEAR — AND WHAT REALLY MATTERS

The battle over whether the Iran negotiations go forward or are forced to fail is bigger than the terms of any “deal”. An agreement won’t decide any of the great issues of our time, but it bears on which way the world will turn in this century.

The United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, Germany and Iran are at the table negotiating a difficult issue. Sadly, that’s a rare phenomenon in a world torn by chaotic violence, wars, big power rivalries, and fears of worse to come. Negotiations and cooperation could be viewed as a sign of hope, one small step toward coming together on humanity’s most unavoidable challenges: climate change and the threat of nuclear war.

Why is Netanyahu hysterical? Why is he rallying the GOP and a majority of Congressional Democrats against Obama’s “bad deal”?

I don’t think it’s only a ploy on the eve of Israeli elections. Nor is it a genuine fear of an imminent or soon-to-be danger that Iran will bomb Israel. It’s more likely that a nuclear-armed Israeli government, if run by expansionists and ultra-orthodox “settlers”, would bomb Iran than the other way around.

What makes him desperate is the threat that serious diplomacy poses to the policies and ambitions of Israel’s extremist right wing government. The Iran negotiations reveal a fissure between strategic interests of the United States and those of Israel’s occupiers and expansionists. While virtually every politician in America swears undying loyalty to Israel, and the armaments and money flow unabated, there is considerable unease about constraining US policy according to the desires of an increasingly ostracized Israeli government.

Incredibly, Netanyahu never mentioned the “Palestinian problem”, but it was surely in his calculations.  The process of real negotiations, especially involving a wide diversity of governments, runs completely counter to the formulas that have sustained and expanded the occupation. Either Israel could rely on the United States, its partner and chosen “mediator”, or it could defy even the US negotiators by expanding settlements, building walls, or countering resistance with indiscriminate military force.

Now the rest of the world is beginning to play a significant part. Condemnation of apartheid, boycotts, support for a Palestinian State cannot be dismissed. Despite Netanyahu’s loud declarations in the name of “all Jews”, many Jews in the United States and Israel are angered by his distortion of “Never Again” into a justification for oppression and violence against others.

What about Netanyahu’s Congressional audience, those who cheered him wildly and are ready, at his bidding, to do their utmost to undercut Obama and doom the negotiations?

Some may know not where the road leads; other Democrats may be offended, but are too intimidated to protest. But here is the real menace: the spectacle that Boehner sponsored was nothing less than the gathering of a war party that seeks full control of US foreign and military policy.

US foreign policy is and has been on a wrong and dangerous course. It remains driven by the “American Century” delusion, the concept that the USA is and will always be the sole superpower.  Despite the many failed wars and missions, there remains the faith that our colossal military superiority and alliances such as NATO can ultimately prevail in securing “world order” consistent with US interests and “exceptional” values. But this changing world requires something different. None of the crises and hugely difficult problems can be mitigated without putting common interests above divisions of “friend or foe” dictated traditionally by conflict over spheres of influence.

That’s another whole story. But what happened this week in Washington is striking evidence that it matters whether voices of sanity gain ground even in limited ways (eg the Iran negotiations, recognition of Cuba, partial agreements on climate change, easing tensions over the Ukraine) or if a “bipartisan” war party takes full command of the controls.

Nothing could be worse — for us, for the Israelis and Palestinians. for the world — than a committed hawk as US President in axis with a Dr. Strangelove at the head of an ultra-right Israeli government. 

A SHORT E-MAIL EXCHANGE

Dear Leon, 

Having just read David Brook's Op Ed piece, "Converting the Ayatollahs", in today's Times (2/27/), I would like to know your opinion on this arrangement Obama is working for with Iran.  

J.

Dear J.,

I read the Brooks column online last night. He's more seductive than Netanyahu, but they're on the same page. I think the gang up of the extreme right (US and Israeli) against Obama for trying to establish a mutually necessary modus vivendi with Iran is extremely dangerous. I could pose a dozen questions here about the consequences of following neocon-GOP policy in the past, and many more about what would come of a Netanyahu reelection coupled with the ascendancy to power of rightist hawks in the USA.  I don't think a repeat of force, a la Iraq and Afghanistan, will "convert the Ayatollahs" and I don't think "converting the Ayatollahs" is the essence of the problem. Just to be provocative — I know I shouldn't — I think a government in Israel of the ultra right (those who assassinated Rabin and cry "Death to the Arabs") would be more able and willing to resort to a nuclear bomb against Iran than the other way around.

I'm not going to write a rebuttal to Brooks today although one occupies my mind along with indignation over Netanyahu's warmongering collusion with the GOP. It's probably my age, but some days I'm low on energy.

    
Best, Leon

ON CAMPUS WHILE BLACK

Yale Library

“Library Visit, Then Held At Gunpoint — At Yale the Police Detained My Son”

I would bet that what happened to Charles Blow’s son has been duplicated at every “elite” university in the USA.

I made a bet just like that some years ago at the University of California, Berkeley. A black employee in our department of Microbiology and Immunology went one floor down in the Life Science building to use the public soda vending machine. He was accosted by a campus police officer demanding to know what he was doing in the building. The young man said he was an employee and protested being stopped. He was taken to police headquarters even though other employees had quickly verified his identity, which only served to make the police officer angry and more stubborn to assert his authority.

Faculty in our department got the employee released and strongly protested the incident. Our department Chairperson, however, said it was just an unfortunate matter of miscommunication, not indicative of any pattern of police misconduct.

That’s where the bet came in.

We agreed to poll individually the six or so post-doctoral fellows and graduate students of color in the various biology departments at Berkeley. Every single one reported being stopped more than once, at gunpoint in a couple of cases. Why? Coming to the laboratory after class hours to attend ongoing research experiments. (Our employee was detained during normal working hours.) What could a black person be doing on the campus of an “elite” university?

Our Chairperson was convinced. The Department took the case to the Chancellor, who reprimanded the Police Chief. Chancellor and Chief both apologized to the employee, but as is virtually always the case, the offending police officer was not disciplined.

Can anyone wonder why Charles Blow was “fuming”? He closes his column thus: “…the scars cannot be unmade. My son will always carry the memory of the day he left his college library and an officer trained a gun on him.”

Ask why a new generation is so angry and refuses to take it! What happens at Yale or Berkeley is a small but very meaningful part of the saga unfolded at Ferguson and Staten Island. As Blow says: “There is no amount of respectability that can bend a gun’s barrel. All of our boys are bound together.”

NOT CHARLIE

There is no worse way to respond to the horrific Charlie Hebdo murders than to rally millions to take up the Charlie Hebdo banner, “I am Charlie”. It divides France and the world into two all-encompassing warring camps, as if on one side are those ready to identify with hate speech and, on the other, the Islamic populations in whose name the assassins claim to seek revenge. What a terrible trap, dug even deeper as humanity is already entangled in tragic and futile conflict!

Certainly there is sympathy for the victims of murder and determination to thwart terrorist actions. But promotion of religious and race hate remains contemptible. Its consequences are not only in incidents of awful retaliation, but, far more widely, in fostering oppression, injustice and violence against “the other.”

Granted, society’s response to hate advocacy ought not to be banning free speech.  But no decent society can fail to expose it, oppose it, and fully support its victims.

As more than a few people have commented, when  “I am Charlie” embraces indifference to or support for anti-Muslim provocations, it is no less vile than endorsement of anti-Semitic or Jim Crow “satire”, both of which have a very long and very bloody history.

TURNING THEIR BACKS…

Mobilizing tens of thousands of police from around the country to come to New York to demonstrate is far more than a memorial to fallen comrades.

While it is Mayor DeBlasio to whom many in uniform turn their backs, it’s the millions of Americans who say “Black lives matter” who receive the menacing response. Loud and clear, the message is the police will not be moved. Counter attack rather than reform, continuing violence against minority communities and protesters alike is the standard.  Immunity for abuses of justice and crimes by police remains sacrosanct.

One needn’t be a seer, just an ordinary observer of historical experience, to raise the alarm against the political mobilization of police forces, now highly militarized as exposed in Ferguson.

An interesting sidelight concerns reactions to circumstances in which a crazed individual kills, as was the case in the assassination of the two police officers in New York. It is certainly reasonable that the events in Ferguson, Staten Island and elsewhere gave shape to the irrational mindset that randomly targeted two innocent policemen for murder. But Fox News, former Mayor Giuliani and police union chief Lynch only have eyes for their chosen political (progressive) enemy, not for the crazed mental state of the shooter. By contrast, remember most media reaction to the rash of assassinations by anti-abortion and other ultra-right vigilantes: ‘the Left is politicizing random acts by deranged individuals.’

Fortunately, there is no indication that the millions who believe in justice, that “Black lives matter”, will be turned around by a sea of blue uniforms. Once upon a time, protesters against the Vietnam War had to move forward despite massed “blue meanies”. And, of course, there was Selma. When the cause is just, it can transform public opinion and change what’s politically realizable.