The Assassination of Jovenel Moise: What Next for Haiti?

Seth Donnelly

Today, the people of Haiti are facing down the US-backed dictatorship of the ruling Haitian Tet Kale Party (PHTK) that came to power through the fraudulent election of Michel Martelly in 2010 and maintained its grip on power through the fraudulent election of Jovenel Moise in 2016, what Haitian activists refer to as electoral coup d’etats. Both elections were held under UN occupation and sponsored by the US government. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton detoured from her trip to the Middle East at the height of the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt and personally intervened to put Martelly into power. Similarly, the US State Department immediately heralded the 2016 elections as legitimate and subsequent US administrations, first Trump then Biden, continued to prop up the Moise regime diplomatically and financially.

The July 7 assassination of Jovenel Moise by a professional kill squad does not alter US support for the PHTK regime. Unless there is massive opposition by the US public and members of Congress, expect the Biden Administration to continue to support the current PHTK regime led by Prime Minister Claude Joseph or whoever else emerges within this regime to assume power during this transition. Expect the Biden Administration to provide ongoing funding for its brutal security forces. These central points should not be obscured by escalating media speculation regarding “who did it”, particularly in the aftermath of arrests of ex-Colombian soldiers and several Haitians with US ties such as Christian Emmanuel Sanon.

What Are the Characteristics that Define the PHTK Regime Under Both Martelly And Moise?

The PHTK regime is a puppet dictatorship installed and maintained by the US government and UN occupation forces, in coordination with members of the Haitian upper class, operating against the interests of the impoverished majority of the Haitian people. The following are central characteristics of the regime:

1. Engaging in pervasive corruption and the massive looting of public funds.

2. Facilitating land grabs and the dispossession of Haitian farmers, including by Moise himself to enlarge his personal banana republic, as well as the plunder of Haiti’s vast natural resources (gold, petroleum, bauxite and more) by domestic oligarchs and foreign corporations. The “open” investment climate supported by the PHTK regime is noted in this 2018 US State Department Report on “doing business in Haiti”.

3. Waging a war on the poor majority and the popular, grassroots Lavalas movement through horrific massacres in poor neighborhoods such as Lasalin and Bel Air, violent gentrification, and targeted assassinations and rapes of human rights activists. These gross human rights violations perpetrated by the regime are also documented by the International Human Rights Clinic of the Harvard Law School in its April 2021 report Killing with Impunity: State-Sanctioned Massacres in Haiti.

What Were the Limits of Moise’s Effectiveness as a Puppet Ruler?

1. Moise proved incapable of containing the massive, grassroots uprising to establish a truly popular, democratic government. Since Moise took power, the Haitian people have taken to the streets by the hundreds of thousands, again and again, facing live ammunition, tear gas, arbitrary arrest, torture, rape, and extrajudicial killings by the Haitian National Police (HNP)– trained by UN occupation officials in Haiti and by the US police, including the NYPD. The HNP have likewise been funded by the US government to the tune of millions of dollars per year, with US funding increasing under the Trump Administration, a move correlating with increasing human rights violations by the HNP. The Biden Administration has likewise continued this support for the police force clearly implicated in massacres and gross human rights violations. Despite such US training and funding of the HNP, Moise has been unable to keep “law and order”. Huge protests continue to erupt. At the same time, regime-backed paramilitaries (“gangs”) like the G9 death squad, led by former policeman Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, continue to terrorize the poor people of all ages in Port-au-Prince through a reign of kidnappings, torture, rape, and killings. G9 and paramilitary violence have displaced thousands of people who have been forced from their neighborhoods after their homes have been burned down and their relatives and neighbors have been massacred.

2. Moise recently clashed with members of the small, powerful Haitain upper class, such as Reginald Boulos and other oligarchs. This clash reflected intra-elite squabbles, as Moise was using his political power to consolidate his hold in ways reminiscent of the Duvalier dictatorships.

3. There was growing opposition inside of the US Congress to the Biden Administration’s ongoing support of the Moise regime, as reflected by this April 26th letter from 68 members of the US House of Representatives to the Biden Administration, noting that the Moise regime “lacks the credibility and legitimacy to oversee a constitutional referendum… or to administer elections that are free and fair.” In the aftermath of this letter, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced, as reported on June 9, that the US would no longer support the plan by the Moise regime to augment its power through holding a bogus “referendum” this summer to weaken the Haitian Constitution. Despite this policy reversal, the Biden Administration nonetheless continued to support the regime to illegally stay in power and manipulate elections scheduled for this next September. The US has allocated extensive funding for these sham elections which will include the referendum, in violation of the wishes of the Haitian majority. Moreover, the Biden Administration called for more US funding for the Haitian police, despite the clear record of gross human rights violations linked to the police. Yet this support by the Biden Administration for Moise was facing mounting political opposition in Congress.

What Drives US Foreign Policy Towards Haiti?

In his speech “Beyond Vietnam: a Time to Break the Silence” given in the Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stated: “All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before.” He protested the fact that the US government stood on the wrong side of this revolution, in Vietnam and elsewhere. Nowhere is this more graphically illustrated than in Haiti.

US policy towards Haiti, as elsewhere through the “Third World”, has been remarkably consistent over the 19th, 20th, now 21st centuries, based on three pillars: 1) a white supremacist opposition to genuine decolonization and national liberation by Black and colonized peoples; 2) the Monroe-doctrine mindset of the US as the police officer of the western hemisphere in particular and the world in general; and 3) the elevation of US business and local upper class interests above the basic human rights of the poor majority, along with the elevation of capitalist exploitation over popular democracy.

In 1804, Haitians waged a successful revolution against one of the most powerful European empires of the time, emancipating themselves from slavery and colonialism, becoming the world’s first Black republic and the first nation to permanently ban slavery. It can be said that the Haitian Revolution was the most radical assertion of the right to have rights in human history. Fueling hope, resistance and rebellion among enslaved people throughout the Caribbean and the United States, the newly independent Haitian government offered asylum and citizenship to any African who escaped slavery. The independent Haitian government invited people of African and Indigenous origins who were fleeing oppression to come and live in Haiti. Freedom fighters such as Simon Bolívar and liberation movements throughout the Americas were given material support by the Haitian government on the condition that they abolish slavery if they came to power. Haiti stands at the very center of the world struggle to end slavery.

Haiti’s freedom posed a great threat to the system of slavery in the US and the Americas. The white supremacist leaders of the United States attempted to strangle the new nation at its birth by instituting a worldwide boycott against Haiti. France took similar action, forcing Haiti to pay reparations to French slave owners for the property they lost when slavery ended. This “property” was the human beings who had been enslaved. The debt was not paid off until the 1940s, by which time banks in the United States had taken over the collection process. Over time Haiti paid France $21.7 billion, an extortion that has been aptly called the greatest heist in history.

In the 20th century, Haiti became a virtual colony of the United States, beginning in 1915, when the U.S. Marines were sent by President Woodrow Wilson to occupy the country. More than 20,000 people were killed by the marines. During 19 years of occupation Haitians put up fierce and protracted resistance, and Black activists in the United States were in the forefront of solidarity with the Haitian struggle. The NAACP denounced the invasion, as did the Garvey Movement. NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson detailed the crimes committed by US occupying forces in “The Truth About Haiti: An NAACP Report” (1920) published in The Crisis. The marines finally left Haiti in 1934, leaving in their place the notorious Haitian Armed Forces to violently protect foreign corporations and the Haitian elite by smashing all opposition.

From the 1950s through the 1980s, the US government supported the brutal dictatorships of “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who tortured and killed thousands of Haitians. The popular mass movement that came to be known as Lavalas (The “flash flood” of the people), succeeded in toppling the Duvalier dictatorship and electing Jean-Bertrand Aristide as President of Haiti. Twice, the United States supported coups to overthrow the elected government, in 1991 and 2004. Ever since this last coup, Haiti has been occupied by the United Nations, as authorized by the UN Security Council, at the behest primarily of the US, France, and Canada. Under this occupation, the people of Haiti have been engaged in a fierce struggle against a series of puppet dictatorships installed by the US. What is important to recognize now is that the current PHTK regime is the institutional manifestation of the 2004 coup, an attempt to make the coup permanent, with or without Jovenel Moise.

Solidarity Is Needed Now More Than Ever

Today, the people of Haiti are struggling courageously to establish their own transition government of Sali Piblik (public safety) drawing on dedicated professionals and activists from all sectors of Haitian society, a government capable of stabilizing society and attending to people’s most pressing needs, while organizing truly fair and free elections. In this struggle, Fanmi Lavalas, the party of the Lavalas movement, remains a vital force, based on speaking to the needs of the poor majority. The Haitian people have not forgotten what Lavalas could accomplish during the brief period of real democracy before the US coup of 2004 hurled the country back into misery. During this brief period of real democracy, more schools were built than in the previous 150 years of Haitian history, healthcare was expanded, affordable housing was constructed, cooperatives were formed, the dreaded army was disbanded, women’s rights were expanded, along with so many more achievements. And all of this was done with a tiny national budget while the US attempted to economically strangle Haiti by cutting off aid and loans. In contrast, the PHTK regime has been fully backed by the US and had a budget 14 times greater, yet it can only show deepening poverty and misery for the masses of people, including a doubling of acute severe childhood malnutrition, along with widespread massacres and gross human rights violations– all made possible by the USA. As Fanmi Lavalas put it in a statement on March 2nd, 2021:

“Indeed, today’s reality clearly lays bare the truth. If there had not been a February 29, 2004 kidnapping coup d’etat, today we would not have a government of kidnappers that causes each and every Haitian citizen to go about with his or her own coffin. Yes, ever since the 2004 coup d’etat, the masses have never ceased to experience more and more suffering. Massacres, repression, misery, starvation, unemployment, bullets, tear gas, kidnapping… and more. The criminals have not stopped stealing the lands of the peasants. If we can’t go to school, can’t eat, can’t have decent housing, if we don’t have potable water to drink, if we don’t have security, if they are kidnapping us, it is a direct consequence of the 2004 kidnapping coup d’etat.”

All progressive-minded people in the US need to make the struggle of the Haitian people central to our own struggles. We need to organize solidarity protests everywhere we can and pressure our members of Congress to do the following:

1. Cut off all US aid for the Haitian police once and for all.

2. Stop the Biden Administration’s support for the PHTK regime regardless of who the new figurehead becomes.

3. End US support for sham elections and the Constitutional referendum organized by the PHTK regime.

4. Support the right of the Haitian people to form, through their own popular movement, their own transition government free from US interference. No US military intervention in Haiti.

The Danger NATO Poses to Americans

Jacob Hornberger

Imagine a massive nuclear exchange between the United States and China. That obviously would not be a pretty sight for the people of either nation. As the mushroom clouds arose over both nations, imagine thinking to yourself: “All this because of a socialist road.”

According to an article in the London Daily Mail, the governments of China and Montenegro entered into an agreement in which China agreed to build a road for Montenegro that would extend to the Serbian capital of Belgrade. The road is only partially built and is now being called the “road to nowhere.”

China financed the road with a $1 billion loan to Montenegro. The first installment on the loan is due this month. But there is a good chance that Montenegro, “whose debt has soared to more than double its GDP,” will have to default.

The loan agreement entitles China to seize land within Montenegro, so long as it isn’t owned by the military or used for diplomatic purposes.

What does all this have to do with a nuclear war between the United States and China? 

If Montenegro defaults and, for whatever reason, refuses to permit China to seize its collateral, China might well invade the country to enforce its loan agreement. 

What does that have to do with the United States?

In 2017, Montenegro became a member of NATO. Under NATO’s membership rules, NATO members, including the United States, are bound to come to the defense of other NATO members in the event that a non-NATO nation attacks them. 

I can’t help but wonder how many Americans realize that they have had their lives and fortunes pledged to the defense of Montenegro. For that matter, the same holds true with respect to all the other members of NATO, which are as follows: Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, and United Kingdom.

What’s amazing is how this process works. No one came to Congress and asked whether the American people were willing to sign a treaty with Montenegro that committed American lives and fortunes to the defense of Montenegro in some future war. My hunch is that if that had happened, enough Americans would have risen up to successfully oppose such a treaty.

Instead, all that had to be done was to have NATO bureaucrats approve Montenegro as a new NATO member. No approval of the American people was needed at all. The lives and fortunes of the American people are determined by bureaucrats in Brussels, Belgium, where NATO headquarters are located.

This is nuts! As recently as 2020, NATO bureaucrats agreed to admit North Macedonia into the organization. North Macedonia? Where the heck is North Macedonia?

Why do the American people continue to go along with this junk? Do they have such low regard for their own lives and fortunes that they are willing to subject themselves, their families, and their money to the whims of faraway foreign bureaucrats? Or do they just feel too helpless to stand up and say no? Or is their passivity just part of the overall deference-to-authority mindset that is inculcated into Americans in public (i.e., government) schools?

Let’s assume that there was no NATO and that China then attacked Montenegro to enforce its road loan agreement. How many Americans would travel to Montenegro to give their lives in the defense of Montenegro? 

Answer: None! Not one single American, including the most ardent interventionists and anti-communists and including every member of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, would go to Montenegro to defend the country, 

Why should the United States be part of an organization in which foreign bureaucrats are deciding when and under what conditions the American people are going to war? Why shouldn’t Americans be free to decide which wars to enter on an individual war-by-war basis?

Our nation’s Founding Fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, warned against these types of “entangling alliances.” Today’s Americans would be wise to heed their words and withdraw the United States from NATO, that old Cold War dinosaur, before it’s too late.

UK government refuses to reveal details of its support for the Saudi war machine

Jean Shaoul

The UK government has refused to provide any substantive answers to questions about secret meetings with major arms suppliers to advise them on policy towards Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. These reactionary and corrupt monarchies, notorious for their crushing of all opposition to their policies at home and abroad, are major purchasers of British weapons and military materiel.

An all-party parliamentary committee had accused the government of using public monies to make hidden payments to institutions that have “whitewashed human rights abuses” in the Gulf, exploding the government’s claims to promote human rights on the international arena.

According to the website Declassified UK, in January 2016, Defence Procurement Minister Philip Dunne and junior foreign minister Tobias Ellwood held a secret meeting with a director of Raytheon, a leading US arms manufacturer, as Saudi Arabia rained bombs on Yemen, without declaring the session, as required by the ministerial rules. The meeting only came to light due to the publication in April of former foreign minister Sir Alan Duncan’s memoir, “In the Thick of It: The diaries of a minister.”

Conservative MP Alan Duncan in Westminster (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Duncan is a libertarian and former oil trader whose support for the Palestinians and a two-state solution incurred Israel’s wrath. Israeli diplomat Shai Masot at the embassy in London was caught on camera talking of “taking down” Duncan.

Duncan said that the Ministry of Defence’s Gulf Advisory Committee had organised the meeting, which he had attended, to discuss oil prices and future visits to Saudi Arabia by then-Prime Minister David Cameron and others.

After initially denying such a committee existed, ministers acknowledged there was a Gulf Advisory Group, apparently a different body from the equally secretive Gulf Strategy Unit, and that Richard Paniguian, a director of Raytheon from 2015 to 2017, had been invited to the meeting. It was Paniguian who, having spent most of his working life with BP, the giant oil company, headed its delegation to UK trade minister Elizabeth Symons before the invasion of Iraq, when his team told her that Iraq’s oil would be of “immense strategic advantage.” He also helped to obtain lucrative deals with Russia and Libya before going on to run the MoD’s arms sales division.

Also in attendance at the 2016 meeting was Symons, now a Baroness and Labour peer, Conservative peer Patricia Morris and former UK military chief Lord Guthrie, whose parliamentary register of interests says he is a director of oil firm Gulf Keystone Petroleum, although Declassified was told he had left the company in 2015.

The government claims to have no record of the minutes of the January 2016 meeting. It simply confirmed that the Gulf Advisory Group had existed for more than two years until September 2018 and that Sir Geoffrey Tantum had also attended the January 2016 meeting. Tantum, a former MI6 controller for the Middle East, is a key adviser to Bahrain’s King Hamad. Hamad only retained his throne courtesy of Saudi Arabia’s brutal military suppression of the mass uprising in 2011, targeting the kingdom’s majority Shia community, and the imprisonment of at least 1,500 political activists. Hamad has rounded up opposition activists and sent them with regular forces to fight alongside Saudi troops in Yemen. For his contribution to maintaining Britain’s relations with this despot, Tantum was knighted in 2018.

That the meeting, its attendees and indeed the existence of the Committee were kept secret is because the public are deeply hostile to the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia for use against the people of Yemen and Bahrain, and because its agenda breaches the British government’s pledge in 2014 when it signed the Arms Trade Treaty not to sell arms to countries that might use them in violation of international humanitarian law.

Destroyed house in South Sanaa, Yemen. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Since the start of the war in 2015, the British government has licensed more than £6.8 billion of arms sales to Saudi Arabia. But this is a vast underestimate, with Britain’s largest arms manufacturer BAE Systems reporting £17.5 billion in revenue from services and sales to Saudi Arabia since 2015. While the Campaign Against the Arms Trade won a legal action in 2019 forcing the government to stop issuing export licences for arms to Saudi Arabia pending a review of how these weapons had been used in the war, the government resumed sales in July last year. Ignoring the mountains of evidence compiled by the United Nations and international aid and humanitarian agencies, it claimed that any violations of international humanitarian law were “isolated incidents” and proceeded to license a further £1.6 billion sales to Saudi Arabia, while announcing it is to cut its 2021-22 aid to Yemen by more than half.

Further evidence of the government’s support for the criminal activities of the Gulf monarchs comes from the recently published parliamentary report, “The Cost of Repression”, investigating Britain’s support for the six Gulf States: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman. Focusing on the £53.4 million payments made via the Integrated Activity Fund (IAF) that operated between 2016 and 2020, it found that the monies benefited institutions in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia that “continue to be implicated in serious human rights and international law violations”, adding that the government’s mandatory human rights impact assessments are “flawed, improperly applied and entirely absent in some cases.”

The report accuses the government of being “misleading and deceptive” and making “false” statements about the way the funds have been used. Their concern that the government is “at risk of complicity” in abuses comes as Prime Minister Boris Johnson pursues free trade agreements with the Gulf States post-Brexit.

As well as supplying arms, Britain has sent more than 80 Royal Air Force personnel to Saudi Arabia, some working within the command-and-control centre that selects targets in Yemen for bombing and others training the Saudi air force. Special Forces commandos were reported to be operating on the ground. A further 6,200 British contractors work at Saudi military bases, training pilots and maintaining aircraft.

Declassified has also reported that there are up to 30 troops based at Al-Ghaydah airport in Yemen’s eastern province of Mahra training Saudi forces. Britain’s ambassador to Yemen Michael Aron, who was repeatedly questioned on Yemen’s TV over allegations that UK forces had been seen in the east of the country, did not deny the allegations. This flies in the face of the government’s claims that it is “not a party” to the Saudi-led coalition’s war in Yemen to restore the hated government of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi that was ousted by the Houthi rebel group.

The venal Saudi monarchy, which routinely assassinates its opponents, tortures, imprisons and beheads oppositionists and dissidents, serves as a crucial custodian of Britain’s geostrategic interests in the energy-rich region and a key partner in Washington and London’s anti-Iranian axis.

According to the World Bank, some 233,000 Yemenis had died by the end of last year, “with half the deaths caused by a lack of food or access to healthcare, as well as by the lack of basic infrastructure to provide these services”. More than four million people have been displaced in the six years of war, while the horrific social and economic conditions, including a cholera outbreak that has raged since 2016 and the pandemic, have prevented people from returning to their homes. The country is on the brink of famine, with 24.1 million or 80 percent of Yemen’s population dependent for their survival on aid and 58 percent living in extreme poverty, unable to afford enough food and water or sanitation services.

Speaking at a G20 event on humanitarian aid two weeks ago, David Beasley, head of the UN's World Food Programme (WFP), said Yemen was one of several countries facing a catastrophe without urgent action to address the shortage of food. “These are not just numbers, these are not just statistics, these are people with real names, real lives, fragile and literally on the brink of starvation.”

Beasley gave voice to the G20’s real fears when he added, “If we don’t address their needs, over the next six to nine months you could have unprecedented famine of biblical proportions, destabilisation of nations and mass migration.”

Cuba sees largest protests in decades as economy deteriorates and COVID-19 pandemic worsens

Alexander Fangmann

Thousands of Cubans engaged in mass demonstrations on Sunday in and near Havana and other cities throughout the country in the largest wave of protests on the island since 1994. Like the earlier Maleconazo, the current wave of protests has been driven by years of economic hardship, with the COVID-19 pandemic serving as a trigger event to expose the rotten foundations of the Cuban government’s petty-bourgeois nationalist perspective.

Anti-government protesters march in Havana, Cuba, Sunday, July 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Eliana Aponte, file)

Protests appear to have begun in San Antonio de los Baños, a municipality southwest of the capital. However, as videos circulated on social media, they quickly spread elsewhere, including Havana, and most of the country’s major cities, including Santiago de Cuba, Santa Clara, Matanzas, Cienfuegos and Holguín, as well as numerous smaller towns such as Palma Soriano.

While some protesters advanced slogans including “Freedom” and “Down with the dictatorship,” others called attention to increasing hunger and food shortages, and in some cases demanded COVID-19 vaccines and other medical supplies as cases of the Delta variant flare. Protesters also looted some “dollar stores,” widely hated as symbols of inequality where those with access to dollars are able to purchase imported items at inflated prices.

There were numerous clashes with police, as officials carried out arrests of protesters and deployed tear gas and other repressive measures, in some cases leading protesters to overturn police cars or pelt them with rocks and concrete. In a bid to shut down the protests, the government has been intermittently cutting off internet access.

Among those arrested were Frank García Hernández and others associated with the “Comunistas.” García Hernández was the conference organizer of the “International Academic Event Leon Trotsky” in May 2019, and played a central role in barring the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) from participating in the conference, which was attended by Pabloites and other representatives of the pseudo-left.

Although there is much confusion among the protesters, for the most part they appear to be driven by the same factors that are bringing workers and youth elsewhere into the streets: the increasingly unbearable conditions of life and stifling political repression. The motivations for the Cuban protests are similar to those behind the protracted mass demonstrations in Colombia, which have been far more brutally repressed, but given a fraction of the attention by the US media.

Already difficult due to a drop-off in subsidies from Venezuela, itself in deep crisis, economic conditions over the past year have deteriorated even further as the COVID-19 pandemic caused international tourism to evaporate and even affected the sugar harvest, which was the smallest since 1908. Officially, the economy shrank 11 percent, the biggest contraction since 1993.

As a result of the decline in hard currency earnings, imports to the island have fallen 40 percent, leading to pervasive shortages and widespread anger over the hours-long daily queuing that has become necessary to obtain basic commodities.

There is also increasing anger now over the government’s response to the pandemic, which has seen deaths per day skyrocket and a near collapse of the health system in Matanzas as the Delta variant has taken hold. As Cuba saw 6,422 new cases, Francisco Durán, national director of epidemiology, said during a Friday video conference, “I don’t have to say that this is the worst day for Cuba since the start of the pandemic.”

Just a few days later, Cuba saw a record 6,923 cases on Sunday, and 47 deaths, in a country of just under 11.2 million, with cases basically doubling over the previous week. Having seen only 12,200 cases in all of 2020, the island has now recorded over 232,000 so far in 2021, while deaths have risen from 146 to a total of 1,579. There are now over 32,000 active cases in the country.

Over half the recent cases have occurred in the province of Matanzas, whose famous Varadero beach resort reopened to international tourism in November of last year. Public health policy has been subordinated to economic considerations, just as they have been elsewhere, including the United States. With the surge in case numbers, the province has run out of hospital beds, leading the government to “hospitalize” patients at home.

Appearing on television Sunday, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel referred to these problems, admitting, “Now, we have to implement domiciliary hospitalization in the wake of insufficient capacities in a group of Cuban provinces,” and urged Cubans to “have a more direct and responsible participation.”

Cuba’s vaccination efforts have been slow, with only around 3 million Cubans having received at least one dose of vaccine and just 15 percent fully vaccinated. Rather than import foreign-produced vaccines, Cuba has developed its own vaccines, named Soberana-02 and Abdala, which require multiple doses, using older vaccine development technologies. A Cuban study indicates the Abdala vaccine, which requires 3 doses two weeks apart, is around 92 percent effective, but the study has not been published, and was carried out prior to the predominance of the Delta variant.

In an attempt to echo Fidel Castro’s own personal appeal to protesters to back down in 1994, Díaz-Canel visited San Antonio de los Baños on Sunday after the protests and reportedly entered several homes to take questions from residents, many of whom were reportedly fed up with widespread power outages.

On television Monday, Díaz-Canel made clear the government understood legitimate grievances were being aired by layers of the population acting independently of US-backed, “pro-democracy” figures, but claimed they were being manipulated by these forces into protesting. “We must make clear to our people that one can be dissatisfied, that’s legitimate, but we must be able to see clearly when we’re being manipulated,” he said.

Elsewhere, Díaz-Canel stated, “As if pandemic outbreaks had not existed all over the world, the Cuban-American mafia, paying very well on social networks to influencers and YouTubers, has created a whole campaign and has called for demonstrations across the country.” Following the protests, Díaz-Canel called for “Revolutionaries to the streets” in support of the government and said, “The order to combat has been given,” and perhaps more ominously, “We are prepared to do anything.”

This earned a rebuke from Julie Chung, Acting Assistant US Secretary of State for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, who tweeted, “We are deeply concerned by ‘calls to combat’ in #Cuba. We stand by the Cuban people’s right for peaceful assembly. We call for calm and condemn any violence.”

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez called for US military intervention, “to protect the Cuban people from a bloodbath,” while the Biden administration issued an official statement of staggering hypocrisy calling for the Cuban government to respect the Cuban people’s “right of peaceful protest and the right to freely determine their own future” and to “serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves.”

One of the more cynical calls has been for the opening of a “humanitarian channel” for medicine and supplies, which has been supported on social media using the hash-tag #SOSCuba. The call for humanitarian aid in this way recalls the attempt to push a “humanitarian convoy” across the Francisco de Paula Santander bridge connecting Colombia and Venezuela in 2019. US puppet Juan Guaidó and the right-wing opposition in Venezuela had hoped the trucks laden with supplies provided by the CIA-linked United States Agency for International Development (USAID) would provoke mass defections from the Venezuelan military and lead to popular support for ousting Maduro.

Washington has not ruled out sending troops to Haiti

Bill Van Auken

The Biden administration appears to be attempting to cobble together a national unity regime to replace assassinated president Jovenel Moïse in the hopes of staving off mass social unrest in Haiti.

US President Joe Biden told reporters in Washington Monday that “Political leaders need to come together” in Haiti. He added, “The US stands ready to continue to provide assistance and I’ll have more for you as we move on,” providing no details on US plans.

Haitian police officers that escort the former Senators, Youri Latortue and Steven Benoit to the courthouse in Port-au-Prince, Monday, July 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Joseph Odelyn)

The White House reported Monday that a US delegation of State Department, Homeland Security, FBI and National Security Council officials dispatched to Port-au-Prince met jointly with acting Prime Minister Claude Joseph, Prime Minister-Designate Ariel Henry and Senate President Joseph Lambert, each of whom has claimed to be the legitimate head of state in the wake of the July 7 assassination of Moïse.

The lightening trip by the US delegation lasted less than 24 hours, with the American officials arriving in Port-au-Prince on Sunday and returning to Washington to brief Biden on Monday.

The White House statement said that the visiting US security delegation discussed with Haitian officials the “security of critical infrastructure,” an oblique reference to acting Prime Minister Joseph’s panicked call for the US to send troops to the Caribbean-island nation.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Mathias Pierre, Haiti’s elections minister, expanded on Joseph’s request: “What do we do? Do we let the country fall into chaos? Private properties destroyed? People killed after the assassination of the president? Or, as a government, do we prevent? We’re not asking for the occupation of the country. We’re asking for small troops to assist and help us. … As long as we are weak, I think we will need our neighbors.”

Haiti was occupied by US Marines for the first time beginning in 1915. The pretext for President Woodrow Wilson sending troops into Haiti then was the last assassination of a Haitian president—Vilbrun Guillaume Sam—and the supposed threat of anarchy. The Marines stayed for nearly two decades, brutally suppressing a nationalist insurgency and imposing in their stead the repressive Garde d’Haiti, which in turn provided the foundation for the savage US-backed Duvalier dictatorship, which ruled the country for another 30 years.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that the Haitian officials’ request for a US military intervention was “still under review” and had not been ruled out.

A spokesman for the United Nations also stated that Joseph’s request for a return of UN “peacekeepers” was under review. The last UN force was sent into Haiti under Brazilian command in 2004 with the express purpose of preventing a return to power of elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted in a US-backed coup. The force was withdrawn in 2017 after years of repression and spreading a devastating cholera epidemic in the Haitian population.

Believed by many to have come to office through a rigged election, having ruled by decree after effectively shutting down the legislature and suppressing the courts and over-staying his constitutional term, which ended in February, Moïse was widely hated in Haiti. Nonetheless, there are fears both within the venal Haitian ruling elite and in Washington that his death could open up a political vacuum leading to revolt from below in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

The facts of Moïse’s assassination early last Wednesday morning remain far from clear. He was riddled with 12 bullets by his assassins in an attack on his villa in the wealthy Petionville suburb of the capital Port-au-Prince.

In the latest development, the Haitian police announced the arrest of 63-year-old Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a failed businessman and evangelical Christian preacher who has lived in Florida for decades. He is accused of being the middleman between a hit squad comprised of Colombian mercenaries and a pair of as yet unnamed masterminds behind the political murder. Acquaintances of Sanon interviewed by the media in Florida described him as a most unlikely organizer of an assassination.

According to the official version of the Haitian police, the assassination was carried out by Colombian mercenaries, 18 of whom are detained, with three others killed. Two US citizens of Haitian descent are also charged, one of whom, James Solages, was a former head of security at the Canadian embassy in Port-au-Prince and a driver and bodyguard for the actor Sean Penn’s charitable pursuits in Haiti.

While the Colombian mercenaries included retired military personnel implicated in bloody crimes in the dirty counterinsurgency war in Colombia, relatives insisted that they had been hired to provide security, not carry out an assassination. They were contracted by a Florida-based security firm called CTU, headed by a Venezuelan national.

Steven Benoit, an opposition Haitian senator, told reporters in Haiti that Moïse “was assassinated by his security agents,” adding, “It was not the Colombians.”

Not a single member of Moïse’s security detail suffered a scratch in the assassination, and questions have been raised as to how the Colombian mercenaries could have gained access to Moïse’s villa, which can be reached only by one road that is guarded by police. Moreover, most of the Colombians were rounded up at their hotels after the assassination, without any resistance or apparent plan to leave the country.

The US security personnel detailed to the investigation into Moïse’s murder will no doubt aid in whatever coverup is required to protect those in Haiti’s ruling elite who orchestrated the killing to settle accounts within the corrupt dealings between the government and business interests.

Social media posts have signaled plans for protests this week against the attempt by the corrupt politicians to consolidate a new illegitimate regime to replace that headed by Moïse. The Haitian police have warned that they will use whatever force necessary to enforce a state of siege declared by acting-Prime Minister Joseph.

Who is Volvo Group Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg?

Jan Miller

Last Friday, Volvo Truck workers in Dublin, Virginia courageously voted down the third concessions contract brought to them by the United Auto Workers (UAW). Now the UAW is trying to impose the contract, which would raise health care costs and represent a wage cut when inflation is factored in, despite workers having just voted it down. A repeat vote is schedule for the factory’s nearly 3,000 workers on Wednesday.

A statement from the Volvo Workers Rank-and-File Committee published Monday calls for workers to oppose the UAW’s attempt to smother the strike and lay down for Volvo.

Volvo has declared the negotiations at an “impasse” and is moving to enforce the third tentative agreement. The company is attempting to reopen the plant and divide the workforce to break the largest strike in the US at present.

In the heat of this struggle workers should learn about Carl-Henric Svanberg, the chairman of the board of Volvo Group. Workers face a massive, ruthless and profitable enemy at Volvo. Its chairman is no less an enemy of the working class—having his hand in the coverup of the BP oil spill, mass layoffs and consolidations at multiple companies, and helping turn Securitas, the top global security firm, used often to spy on and harass striking workers, into the powerful company it is today.

Carl-Henric Svanberg [Source: Volvo Group]

Early Days: Asea, Securitas

Carl-Henric Svanberg, born in 1952 in the north of Sweden, graduated from the Linköping Institute of Technology in 1977 with an engineering degree. Svanberg soon went to work for the engineering firm Asea (now consolidated into ABB one of the largest robotics and power companies in the world). Svanberg cut his teeth managing a multi-million-dollar project to build powerplants in Colombia for Asea.

In 1986 Svanberg was hired by Securitas—now the single largest global security firm—to head its corporate and home alarm wing. Securitas, which bought Pinkerton in 1999, the notorious US detective and strikebreaking company, runs the largest global operation of rent-a-cops and private investigators.

Both companies are used as strikebreakers and worker-surveillance companies to this day. In 2018, 1,400 Frontier Communications workers in West Virginia and Virginia were harassed and surveilled by the security companies to help break the strikes. In November 2019, Amazon hired the company to insert spies into its Wroclaw, Poland warehouse as part of a global operation of surveillance against workers.

While Svanberg left Securitas in 1994, spinning off its profitable lock division Assa Abloy, Svanberg is credited by Advameg’s Reference for Business for turning it into the company it is today. Svanberg, they write, helped Securitas “hone the formula for success that propelled [it] to great heights—a series of acquisitions in Scandinavia, Europe, and the United States.”

The “gentle conqueror”: Assa Abloy and Ericsson

In 1994 Svanberg became the head of Assa Abloy. Both during his time in Securitas and at Assa Abloy, Svanberg pursued aggressive mergers and acquisitions to build up companies and then “consolidate” them, with the loss of thousands of jobs.

According to a 2009 profile from the Times, Svanberg became known as the “Gentle Conqueror” in financial circles as, under his leadership, Assa Abloy bought up 100 firms, including giant competitors such as Yale, Medeco and Vachette. Today, Assa Abloy is the largest lock company in the world.

Svanberg’s secret? Establishing a “disciplined method” in the companies he takes over, according to the Reference for Business. “Discipline” in business is, of course, a euphemism for cost-cutting, layoffs, consolidations, and a stringent work environment.

A Barron’s magazine interview with a leading Swiss banker, for example, describes Svanberg as a “productivity pioneer” for tying workers’ pay to output in the 1980s. That is, Svanberg pioneered parts-work in Europe: forcing workers to speed up on the production line by disincentivizing any pause or rest.

In a 2020 interview with Alumni—a business management company—Svanberg explains (9:50) that when trying to work with the board of a company to restructure, “There is a strength when you want to go through change … people can take a lot of hard stuff and change, and even layoffs, if they do understand why they are doing it and can see the rationale.” By “people understanding,” of course, Svanberg does not mean the workers laid off—but the wealthy executives and board members trying to make profits.

When Svanberg left Assa Abloy and joined Ericsson as its president and CEO in 2003, he soon went to work implementing this ruthless restructuring at the telecommunications giant.

A 2004 New York Times article cites Svanberg as overseeing, just in his first few months, a 14,000-person job cut. This was on top of tens of thousands of jobs that had just been cut prior to his joining. In 2005, Ericsson bought Macroni, a British competitor, again consolidating the companies, cutting several thousand more jobs in the late 2000s.

Covering up an environmental disaster: BP

Svanberg became the chairman of BP—the giant energy and petrochemical company—in January 2010. Four months later, on April 20, 2010, the company would be responsible for the explosion of its Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed 11 workers, injured another 17, and created the largest oil spill in history.

The explosion released an estimated 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico—about 220 million gallons. The spill caused long-lasting damage to animals, reefs and marine life in the area. The equivalent of an estimated 2 million barrels of oil remains trapped in the Gulf.

During his time at BP, Svanberg was responsible for the systematic corporate cover-up of this disaster—colluding with the Obama administration to limit BP’s financial and legal responsibility. Svanberg directly negotiated with Obama at the White House to limit its liabilities.

At the time, the World Socialist Web Site extensively covered the environmental disaster, the effect on workers lives in the Gulf, BP’s criminal negligence, and the extensive efforts of the Obama administration to shield BP from criminal wrongdoing or financial liability. Among other things, BP systematically downplayed the extent of the spill, was responsible for criminal negligence in the safety of the rig’s operation that caused the spill, never had any of its executives sent to jail, and got away with a wrist-slap of a penalty, financially speaking, which stock markets celebrated as a boon—sending BP’s stock up more than 5 percent the day it was announced.

Svanberg famously derided the residents of the Gulf as “small people” at a White House press conference, stating, “We care about the small people. I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies, or greedy companies, don't care. But that is not the case in BP, we care about the small people.” One wonders what words he would use for striking workers in Virginia!

Volvo and today’s struggle

While Svanberg worked as chair of BP, retiring only a few years ago, in 2017, he also was chosen to head the board of Volvo in 2011, just a year after joining BP. Already, Volvo had grown to become the second-largest truck manufacturer in the world—purchasing Mack and several other competitors—and had shed its car manufacturing side, Volvo Cars into a separate entity.

Corporate headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden [Source: Volvo Group]

During the first few years of Svanberg’s chairmanship, Olof Persson headed Volvo as CEO. During these years Volvo underperformed relative to its rivals. Persson, with the board’s blessing, undertook new measures for cost-saving and consolidations to restore profitability for the owners. In late 2013 the company announced it would be laying off 2,000 workers, then again, another 2,400 workers in February 2014.

In 2015, Svanberg helped to oust Persson as CEO, replacing him with Martin Lundstedt, head of rival Scania.

The pivot to Lundstedt, who remains the CEO today, was based on a new corporate mantra of “flexibility.” Svanberg, when he announced Lundstedt’s appointment, stated, “We are now entering into a new phase. You can’t reach world leadership through just cost savings.”

A Reuters financial brief stated that the owners of Volvo would be “looking to Lundstedt” for help in adapting to “rapid swings in the highly cyclical demand for commercial vehicles.” Specifically, Lundstedt had overseen at Scania the fine-tuning of their modular form of truck production that was the “envy” of the global truck industry.

As in the US, where Volvo relies on the UAW to do its dirty work, Svanberg has worked to cultivate close relations with the Swedish trade unions, including IF Metal and Unionen, which have three seats on Volvo’s corporate board of directors. Svanberg also sits on the Ministry of Foreign Trade’s task force with Susanna Gideonsson, president of the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO).

Over the last few years, through cost-cutting measures, Volvo Group has substantially improved its financial condition. It has given billions of dollars to its shareholders just in the last few weeks based on a sale of one of its subsidiaries. Svanberg told the financial world that the company’s “improved profitability, resilience in downturns and strong financial positions” all justified giving out the billions of dollars to its owning capitalists.

If that is the case, that the company has billions to hand out, why are workers at Volvo being squeezed in the latest concessionary contract?

The answer is simple: the money is there but they do not want to give it.

Svanberg and Lundstedt are darlings of the global financial elite because they have consistently, over the last few decades, delivered “discipline,” “resilience,” “profitability” and other catchwords that amount to one thing: paying as little money as possible for the companies inputs, above all labor.

But while Volvo workers are subject to austerity, whether in the US or in Sweden, Svanberg is doing just fine. In fact, in 2017 Svanberg and his wife bought what was, at the time, the most expensive house ever purchased in Sweden—a $14 million townhouse mansion in the upper-class Östermalm district of Stockholm.

Svanberg, like most other leading corporate executives around the world, has made a career out of aggressive cost savings and increased flexibility. From Securitas to BP to Ericsson, Svanberg has operated as the agent of the capitalist system and an enemy to working people. His trajectory is nothing unique, but rather an expression of broader global processes of austerity, discipline and immiseration confronting workers all around the world.

Beijing mounts a diplomatic counteroffensive against Washington’s aggressive stance

Peter Symonds

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime in Beijing has used the official 100th anniversary of its founding on July 1 to mount a diplomatic counteroffensive against the increasingly aggressive efforts of the US to demonise, isolate and encircle China in preparation for military conflict.

On July 6, President Xi Jinping addressed a virtual global meeting that, according to China’s foreign ministry, involved thousands of leaders and representatives from more than 500 political parties and organisations in more than 160 countries. The stage-managed political extravaganza, held in the wake of the centenary celebrations, involved 10,000 participants and multiple venues in China.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is seen on screen during a gala show ahead of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing on Monday, June 28, 2021 [Credit: AP Photo/Ng Han Guan]

The foreign ministry reported that speeches from 20 leaders congratulated the CCP, agreed that political parties had “to deliver happiness for people” and declared their willingness “to work together with the CCP to build a better world.” The speakers included the presidents of Argentina, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Mozambique, Namibia and Serbia, as well as former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev and the prime ministers of Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Morocco.

These motherhood statements of support for the CCP matched the empty, anodyne remarks of Xi, who appealed for global cooperation to rectify every problem from social inequality and the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change, war and famine. None of the participants, all of whom represent and fight for the narrow interests of their own national capitalist classes, including Xi, are committed to actually resolving any of these issues.

In a sign of the profound cynicism that pervaded the event, no mention was made of socialism, communism or Marxism. Nothing was said of the 100 years of CCP’s history—even the falsified Stalinist version—that the meeting was meant to mark.

The central thrust of Xi’s address was a barely concealed criticism of the hegemonic role of American imperialism and its allies, summed up in his appeal for “multilateralism”—as opposed to a global order imperiously dominated by the US. Clearly responding to Washington’s constant refrain that China must abide by the “international rules-based order,” he declared: “International rules should be based on universally-recognised norms rather than rules of the few.”

In comments also aimed against the US, Xi said: “Development is the right of all countries, rather than an exclusive privilege of the few.” He appealed to the meeting to “jointly oppose the practice of seeking technology blockades”—a reference to Washington’s use of unilateral sanctions and technology bans directed at China and other countries.

These remarks will have been welcomed by many of the participants, including from Russia and Iran, which have been also targeted by the US. In its report, China’s state-run Global Times boasted that the event has been “a powerful counterstrike to the Western world’s constant mudslinging at the CCP.”

Xi made a broader pitch to global investors, pledging to “take comprehensive steps to deepen reform and opening up”—that is, further removing restrictions on foreign investment in China and integrating it within global capitalism. He reiterated his confidence in “economic globalisation, despite facing considerable headwinds”—an allusion to the Trump administration’s trade war measures against China, which have continued under Biden.

China’s diplomatic counteroffensive has not, however, been limited to the political showcase of parties looking to Beijing for economic largesse or mutual support against the pressures and threats of US imperialism.

Xi also held a conference call last week with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a bid to secure greater European cooperation. In particular, it was aimed at reviving the investment agreement between the European Union and China that stalled after the EU bowed to US pressure to sanction Beijing over alleged human rights abuses of its Muslim Uyghur minority. While Macron and Merkel noted the issue had been discussed, no commitments were made.

Significantly, China also staged another commemorative meeting last Friday—not of the CCP’s centenary but the 50th anniversary of the secret 1971 visit by former US national security adviser Henry Kissinger to Beijing. Kissinger’s clandestine diplomacy paved the way for the 1972 trip by President Richard Nixon who met with Chinese leader Mao Zedong and sealed a de-facto anti-Soviet alliance. The Nixon visit opened the door for the normalisation of US-Chinese diplomatic relations in 1979.

Last Friday’s event, in which Kissinger participated, was an attempt to reach out to sections of the American political establishment and corporate elite that regard the escalating US confrontation with China an inimical to their interests.

Kissinger called for “serious dialogue” between the two countries to start again soon. Well aware of the deepening danger of conflict, he declared: “We will keep in mind on both sides that not every problem can have an immediate solution, but we should start from the premise that war between our two countries will be an unspeakable catastrophe. It cannot be won.”

The US drive to war, however, is not based on misunderstandings or an incorrect policy, but rather reflects profound economic and geo-political shifts. Mao’s embrace of US imperialism resulted from a deep economic crisis and the danger of conflict with the Soviet Union. It also facilitated China’s reintegration into global capitalism on the basis of the pro-market policies of “reform and opening” spearheaded by Deng Xiaoping in 1978.

Capitalist restoration and a huge influx of foreign investment and technology accelerated after the CCP regime’s brutal crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation. While American corporations made super-profits through the exploitation of cheap Chinese labour enforced by the CCP regime, China has emerged as the world’s second largest economy.

Over the past decade, first under Obama then Trump and now Biden, the US has mounted an offensive on all fronts—diplomatic, economic and strategic—to counter what it regards as the greatest threat to its global dominance. While Kissinger appeals for collaboration and dialogue, a bipartisan consensus of Democrats and Republicans—reflecting a broader agreement in US ruling circles—is determined to use all means, including military, to subordinate China to US interests.

The thread running through China’s diplomatic efforts is an appeal to the US and its allies to reach a new rapprochement based on the further opening up of Chinese economy to foreign investors. The US, however, is not interested in supposed “win-win” collaboration that could undermine its position of global top dog and is increasingly preparing for war.

Xi and the CCP have no progressive answer to the threat of a catastrophic war between nuclear-armed powers. The CCP, which long ago abandoned the struggle for socialist internationalism, is incapable of making any appeal to the international working class—the only social force capable of halting the drive to war.