Re: More 'Militant' than Fidel

["Jose G. Perez" <jg_perez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    [Below I am forwarding to the Marxism List and some other friends and
comrades a reply to one of you who wrote me privately. This comrade
chastised me for my quoting a blank space as comment posting on the failure
of the latest issue of the Militant to cover Fidel Castro's intervention at
the Millenium Summit. He thought that I had failed to realize that the
Militant I was looking at on the web was a previous edition, and urged me to
send that information on to everyone who had received my post.

    [His confusion is understandable, because for some reason it can take
three or more days after the paper is printed before the Militant's site is
fully updated and the new issue date and number noted on the home page.
However, usually the first thing to be updated is in the "new & in the next
issue" section, which is where, on Saturday night, I found the articles of
the issue printed on Thursday. I had checked earlier on Saturday but most of
them had not been posted.

    [I'm not including the comrade's name nor the text of his note to me as
I know he is concerned about his privacy and he hasn't asked me to send it
out. Also, as people can see from the little bit of his header I reproduce
at the end, he posted his note to me around 4 a.m. Sunday morning, probably
just after getting my note, checking the Militant's site, seeing the cover
page had not changed, and immediately firing of his note. I think it is
important to protect the loose, informal nature of these sorts of email
conversations, of sending back a quick comment without necessarily worrying
about it being widely disseminated.

    [I decided to circulate my response to this comrade nonetheless both
because other comrades might have fallen victim to the same misunderstanding
from receiving my email, surfing to the Militant.com, seeing the old issue,
and believing I had mistakenly thought it was the new one. I should have
alerted people on where to look for the contents of the new issue on the
Militant's web site.

    [But also, I ended up pointing out in my note to the comrade who wrote
me what I perceive as a sectarian and abstentionist pattern in the
Militant's coverage of Cuba, and one which, in my view, is hard to reconcile
with the stated positions of one of the party's most authoritative leaders,
Mary-Alice Waters, as presented to the party's annual conference in Oberlin
and quoted (although buried way, way deep in an article) in the Militant
itself.

    [Also, a couple of other comrades wrote to me thinking that the blank
quotation from the Militant had been some kind of computer gremlin or typo,
and asking me for a corrected copy of the email note.

    [So I apologize to people who might have wound up confused by not being
as helpful as I might have been in pointing out where I'd found the contents
on the new issue, and for being overly cryptic and "cute" in the way I tried
to convey they idea that they had nothing to say about Fidel's speech.

    [I hope to send out a more detailed commentary on the SWP's current
attitude towards Cuba, tying up some loose ends from the Elián campaign, in
a few days. -- Jose]

* * *

Dear [deleted],

    Unfortunately, you are mistaken. I was looking at the right issue, the
current issue. I think you were tripped up by the fact that, although the
Militant comes off the press Thursday afternoon, for some reason it takes
them a couple of days to get even the text version posted, and another day
or two for the nicely-formatted edition to come online.

    I say unfortunately because nothing
could please me more than for the SWP to reverse the abstentionist position
it is taking around Cuba and Cuba related issues, even if I had to eat crow
on some of the things I've been saying. But I see no sign that this is
happening. On the contrary, the sectarian stance seems to be hardening.
There is much, much less about Cuba THIS year in the Militant, when Cuba has
become much more prominent in American politics and therefore there are
greater opportunities to explain the importance of the revolution and of
fighting against the hostile U.S. policy, than there was LAST year.

    I would, of course, not hesitate for a second in bringing to the
attention of comrades to whom I sent my note if I had made a blooper as the
one you suggest, and apologizing to these comrades and to the SWP for such a
lapse. Moreover, I would take it as an extremely serious indication
that --whatever my subjective intentions-- I had not been dealing fairly and
objectively with the comrades still in the SWP and their viewpoints. For I'm
certainly Internet and computer savvy enough NOT to have been confused
either by the Militant's dating practices or the fact that its web site is
"out of sync" on most weekends, part with the old issue, part with the new.
Thus I would have to re-examine and rethink and re-verify what I'd written
in the past few months on this and related matters. I was educated in the
same tradition of revolutionary honesty and integrity that you were.
And --frankly-- nothing has wounded me more deeply about what the party and
the Militant have
become (in my view), than the fact that one can no longer take the probity
of the comrades for granted.

    On the Militant's coverage of Cuba's intervention in the Millennium
summit, the particulars are these:

    The text version of the new issue (#35, cover date September 18) was on
the web site Saturday night, the html version is on the web site now (Sunday
night). It is to this issue that I refer. This issue was printed Thursday,
September 7.

    Now, you may be wondering, what drove me to get home from work Saturday
night around 9 p.m. and begin scouring the paper to see how they would cover
Fidel's speech? The answer is simple, for several weeks now I've been, on
and off, working on a new article on the Militant and Elián González, and
the more closely I looked, the more disturbed I have become.

    That's because the same thing happened around the July 26 march, the
biggest one ever held in Cuba. It was simply not covered in the
corresponding issue, which would normally have been printed on the 28th of
July (but perhaps the press run was moved because of Oberlin, which started
on the 27th). It was issue #31, and was dated Aug. 14 instead of Aug. 7
because it was a two week issue.

    And while the issue did not have any room for the July 26 March of the
Fighting People, it did have room for this, in the lead editorial (on the
tobacco tax-dodging "terrorists" arrests in North Carolina): "The sight of a
raid and arrests by 200 heavily armed FBI agents is no longer a new one. It
will be familiar to residents of Miami, who experienced the April 22 assault
by FBI and immigration cops on a private home in that city, ordered by top
cop Janet Reno in the name of  rescuing a Cuban six-year-old."

    The million-strong march was also not covered, nor were Fidel's two
speeches on successive Saturdays (July 30 and Aug 5) that were very clearly
aimed at the U.S. working class public in large part, in issue Number 32,
dated Aug. 21 and printed on Aug. 10, two weeks after the previous one.

    Instead, this issue, in the article launching the fund drive, dragged in
by the hair, a reaffirmation of the line the party took on the INS raid
as motivation for people giving money.

    "The two socialist publications not only present truthful news of
interest to working people. They also provide a Marxist class explanation of
the main questions facing working people.

    "This was captured in the front page of the May 8 issue of the Militant,
headlined "INS assault in Miami strikes blow to the working class: In
defense of the Cuban revolution, in defense of the working class!" which
condemned the April 22 commando-style raid by 150 federal cops on a Miami
home that seized Cuban child Elián González. The socialist press campaigned
both to demand that Washington return six-year-old Elián González to Cuba
and to explain why the INS raid in Miami, far from being a blow for
justice--as the overwhelming majority of the forces in the Cuba solidarity
movement argued--was a move by the U.S. ruling class calculated to reinforce
the powers of the hated migra police. They pointed out how the Clinton
administration used the federal court rulings on the Cuban six-year-old's
case to affirm the broad authority of the executive branch to determine and
carry out immigration and foreign policy--to be used against the interests
of working people."

    This is the ONLY concrete example of Militant coverage mentioned in the
appeal launching the fund drive and a totally bizarre one. Whatever one
thought of the Miami raid, the Elián González case is over and done with.
Cuba has launched a new campaign, against the entire US policy of hostility,
provocations and blockade against the revolution, a campaign which ALL
revolutionaries, but most especially those in the United States, are duty
bound to support.

    And you can go back in the paper, and I have, and see how on most weeks,
they carry a reiteration of the position they took on the Miami raid, most
often dragged in by the hair.

    Why does the Militant constantly harp on the one incident where the SWP
very publicly and prominently clashed with Cuba's line? Why this urge to
highlight that they did not agree with the most experienced, the most
prominent, the most authoritative, and the most respected leader of the
Communist movement on a world scale? And why do this instead of highlighting
the things that all communists are united on around Cuba-US relations, an
end to the blockade, to Washington's manipulation of immigration as a weapon
in its 40-year war against the revolution?

    Why not appeal for funds to better wage the ongoing battle against Helms
Burton, the Cuban Adjustment Act, and the blockade? Why do so on the basis
of an event which, whatever one's position on it might be, is over and done
with?

    It wasn't until the Aug. 28 issue that the Militant mentioned the July
26 rally. It was in the middle of a mile-long article about the SWP's
traditional annual gathering at Oberlin, reporting on a talk by Mary-Alice's
Waters, which referred to two events that had taken place July 26, the day
before she gave the talk.

    "In Colorado, 100 striking coal miners from New Mexico and Wyoming and
their supporters had rallied outside the P&M headquarters near Denver.

    "That same day, more than 1 million people marched through the streets
of Havana, Cuba, celebrating the anniversary of the 1953 assault on the
Moncada army barracks in Santiago--the action that launched the
revolutionary armed struggle that brought down the hated U.S.-backed Batista
dictatorship in January 1959. . . .

    "The UMWA rally in Denver and the 'March of the Fighting People' in
Havana may seem vastly disproportionate given their respective sizes, Waters
said, but they have something much more significant in common. They
underscore the growing interconnections of the fight to strengthen the
working-class resistance in the United States and the workers state in Cuba.

    " 'They register the most important developments in the world class
struggle today--the growing confidence of working people, both in Cuba and
the United States,' she said."

    It is totally incoherent to say THAT and NOT have covered the July 26
march and Fidel's anniversary speeches in a prominent way. Especially since
the Militant had no difficulty covering with a front-page article in the
August 14 issue (the one that would have been printed around July 28) the
July 26 Denver rally, the OTHER example of "the most important developments
in the world class struggle today" singled out by Waters.

    It is almost as if there were two SWP's, the one Mary-Alice Waters is a
central leader
of, and the other one that publishes the paper.

    Thus the coverage of Fidel's intervention in the Millennium summit was a
test of what the SWP's REAL line is, in FACT. For it is entirely possible,
that through carelessness, inadvertence, the overwhelming load of work on
the staff, or even an unfortunate over-reaction to the differences over the
rescue of Elián, the Militant had gone off course in not covering
Cuba as prominently as it should have been, and Mary-Alice's speech at
Oberlin, saying that what was going on in Cuba was just as important to the
world class struggle as the sorts of labor skirmishes here that the SWP is
overwhelmingly focused on, putting it on the same plane of political
importance, was meant to correct this weakness.

    But it's been six weeks since her speech, and there's no sign, no sign
whatsoever, that the comrades have decided to make that shift in practice.
Mary-Alice's fine words about this being one of the two most important
developments in the class struggle on a world scale remain just words on a
page, quickly read, and soon forgotten. They are not the real policy of the
party as presented in its press.

    Fidel's UN speech came Wednesday afternoon, rather late in the
Militant's weekly cycle but still easily accommodated in the next week's
issue, if one thought it important enough, especially given the new, modern
technology with which the paper is being produced. And Fidel's visit had
been all over the U.S. press, his scheduled speaking time had been widely
reported and easily available to anyone who cared to look at the UN's summit
web site. The speech was carried live by the Cuban TV webcast, available to
anyone with a 28.8 modem connection to the Internet an a computer as
primitive as my 1992-vintage 486. It was rebroadcast several times that
night, including both at the beginning and the end of the nightly roundtable
(which end usually at 7 or 7:30 PM); the two newscasts (at 8 p.m. and around
midnight); and separately. The text was immediately posted in several
languages at the government's official Fidel speeches site. Scores of copies
of it in English and Spanish criss-crossed the Internet in emails and
postings. It is simply untenable to say that either the comrades were caught
by surprise by Fidel's speech, or that they could not get material on it in
time to put something in the paper.

    And even if they had, major excerpts were in the New York Times the next
morning, enough so that one could see its tenor and significance. Even then
it would not have been too late to prominently include at least a short
article highlighting the main points and its significance.

    The fact, as I see it, is this: They didn't cover Fidel's speech because
they didn't want to. The OBVIOUS time to do it was in this week's paper,
which would come out while Fidel was still in the states and in the
headlines. The only possible conclusion --especially coming after the
pattern of coverage since Elián went home-- is that the failure to do so was
a conscious, deliberate POLITICAL decision. The exact meaning and dimensions
of this decision is something I hope to take up in the follow up to the
Elián debate I've been working on.

Best regards,

José

P.S. I plan to send a copy of this and an explanation of the objection you
raised in your email to the other comrades I sent the original to, without,
of course, mentioning your name. Partly because I was "too clever by half"
in quoting a blank line. Some thought a computer glitch had "eaten" what was
meant to be between the quotes, and emailed me for another copy. I will not
reproduce your name or address, although if you WANT me to send the original
(or anything else) on to everyone just as I received it I would, of course,
unhesitatingly do so.

----- Original Message -----
From: [deleted]
To: <jg_perez@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, September 10, 2000 3:44 AM
Subject: Re: More 'Militant' than Fidel

[text deleted]