I never use the usted form, it’s against my principles as an anarchist.

Mexico was my final stop before leaving Latin America, and the end of the solo part of my solo trip. Over the roughly seven weeks I spent there I saw the widest variation of any location on the trip: I had perhaps the best single week of the whole trip, but also some chunks of suck.

Gotta take the highs with the lows.

Chiapas ¶

I spent the majority of my time in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico, arriving only days after it was described as a powder keg that can explode at any moment. But first, I had to get there.

The Worst Border Crossing in the World ¶

When we left off, I’d just set out into Mexico in pursuit of my group and shuttle. Chuckling old men sitting on doorsteps pointed me down random side streets and back alleys and I did, much to my surprise, find the group again. They were loading into a new minibus because some genius decided the Mexican immigration office should be 5 km in from the border.

We got there, and our driver decided that this would be a good time to tell us that we needed:

1. a photocopy of our passport;
2. a printed copy of our onward travel ticket;
3. a printed booking reservation for where we were going to be staying; and
4. a printed copy of our bank balance.

Obviously, 5 km into the Chiapan countryside, none of us had any Internet signal and we’d left all our portable photocopiers at home. My email app.  wouldn’t let me access my emails offline (because that’s disabled by default, and I hadn’t changed it on my new phone), and my banking app.  wouldn’t show my balance without an Internet connection; I also learnt that day that my banking app blocks taking screenshots of it. Also, I had my phone language set to Spanish, just to further compound the frustration.

We found one place that did make copies if you emailed things to them, but they didn’t have any Wi-Fi. We found another that also did copies, but was staffed by the world’s slowest man: it took us no less than 40 minutes to get from asking for the password to getting it. Eventually I got everything printed off (I had to get someone else to take a photo of my phone with the bank app.  open), and the guy charged me 20 pesos; I only had Guatemalan quetzales and some US dollars, so I ended up giving him $10.

This whole ordeal had taken the best part of two hours. As I walked across the road to the immigration office I spontaneously started singing a little ditty of my own creation: I hate Mexico, Mexico is shit. The immigration guy didn’t even look at most of the papers, only the flight booking, which he initally misread as June 23 rather than July and was about to only give me a twenty-odd-day visa. Then he realised and acted like I was el dumbass. He gave me fifty-five days instead: three more than I needed, but whatever.

Next, I had to fill in a customs form. Then he sent me back to fill in more of it, because I was obviously supposed to repeat all of my details in the second section, under the section marked official use only. Then I had to go to the bank next door to pay the ludicrous £30 entry tax—and I thought Nicaragua took the piss!

Finally I was done, but I realised that 20 pesos was the equivalent of around $1.15. I was in no mood to get scammed on top of everything else, so I marched back to the photocopier and demanded my money back; I must’ve looked like I meant business, because he gave it back.

We set off for San Cristóbal de las Casas, and I treated myself to an early night. First thing in the morning I lodged support tickets with my bank and email provider telling them that they could sod right off and that I would be looking at alternatives the moment I’m back home.

Not an auspicious start…

Starting in San Cristóbal ¶

I stayed at Fandango, a cheap as chips hostel with an ideal central location (though not so central that you can’t easily walk to non-tourist-priced eateries nearby). The dorms and private rooms were arrayed around a central courtyard, which occasionally hosted dance classes and fiestas. The actual dorms were elaborate MDF constructions, with coffin-like capsules along the ground floor and larger double bed spaces above:

We’d been told to be wary of the water, due in large part to a massive Coca-Cola factory on the outskirts of the city that has poisoned the water supply. I did a bit of shopping and attended a hip-hop fundraiser gig at La Enredadera calling for the release of Manuel Gómez Vázquez, a Zapatista supporter.

Who are the Zapatistas? On January 1^st, 1994—the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into force—armed guerrillas of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) stormed government offices across the state of Chiapas in protest. Predominantly comprised of indigenous people, they fought against the exploitation of their traditional resources that had been happening ever since the Spanish arrived, and which was about to get a big ol’ US-style turbocharging.¹

People around the world watched—largely via the then-novel Internet—as the Zapatistas battled the Mexican military and associated paramilitaries. 100,000 people protested against the repression in Mexico City. After 12 days, the Mexican government declared a ceasefire. Negotiations were held which resulted in the San Andrés Accords, which promised autonomy and recognition to the indigenous peoples. Then they were ignored. The Zapatistas learned that they could not trust what they call the mal gobierno and would have to do things by themselves.

Over the intervening decades, the Zapatista movement has grown to encompass large swathes of the state of Chiapas. The Municipios Autónomos Rebeldes Zapatistas (MAREZ), as their communities are known, have an autonomous system of direct democracy through the juntas de buen gobierno. They also run their own autonomous health system, education system, and more. The Zapatistas still exist in conflict with the Mexican state, which does not formally recognise their autonomy. Even now, roughly one third of the Mexican Army is stationed in Chiapas.²

Photo by the author

Things have been relatively peaceful since the murder of a Zapatista teacher in 2014 (in an attack that left 15 others wounded), but since the start of the pandemic they have witnessed an uptick in paramilitary violence; on the same day that I arrived in Chiapas, an attack on a Zapatista community to the north-east left 7 dead and 3 wounded, and just last week a Mexican newspaper warned that Chiapas is a powder keg that can explode at any moment. The Zapatistas are no fans of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the current president, who is keen to build a train line for tourists through their territories. On top of that, they face off against anti-Zapatista paramilitaries, drug cartels and other unsavoury characters.

Many of the paramilitary groups were set up by the government of the ’60s–’80s during a period known as the Mexican Dirty War (no prizes for guessing which large neighbour of Mexico’s the murderous right-wing government was backed by). There’s evidence to suggest continued government involvement and direction of their activities since then, and given that it’s Mexico and at least one of the most prominent current drug cartels were formed by former Mexican Army commandos it’s clear that the line between the state, the paramilitaries and the narcos are somewhat blurred. Given that AMLO has staked his reputation on getting his train built, the timing of the increase in violence certainly seems suspect. Though the period of armed conflict seemed to have ended during the 2010s, the Zapatistas never disarmed. They used to joke that their guns were merely sleeping.

They also paint a damned fine mural.

CELMRAZ, Week One ¶

All that talk of paramilitaries and sleepy guns is beyond my pay grade, though. I had two big things on my to-do list for Chiapas, and the first was intended to set me up for the second: attending a language school to improve my Spanish. By this point on the trip I was solidly conversational, but hadn’t actually had any formal schooling. I’d heard about the Centro de Español y Lenguas Mayas Rebelde Autónomo Zapatista (CELMRAZ) from another Volcano Day volunteer, after we went to the beach and I asked him where he got his tattoo of a snail wearing a ski mask.

So I was in Chiapas to visit the caracol of Oventik, sometimes referred to as the Zapatistas’ de facto capital, and one of the few Zapatista communities that are (relatively) open to outsiders.

Photo by the author

Day One ¶

Photo by the author

The first day at the school began sat under a tree, talking (in Spanish) about the concept of work. The promotor explained the relationship between two words in Tsotsil Mayan: a’mtel and kanal. A’mtel refers to work that is performed for oneself, for the benefit of one’s family and community. For example, the promotores de la educación at the CELMRAZ are not paid for their work: their efforts are recognised as being valuable for the community, and so others in their village look after their fields during the alternating weeks they spent there with us. Kanal, on the other hand, is work done to benefit someone else, be that a boss, tyrant or the mal gobierno; it is a corruption of the Spanish ganar that came from the experience of having their labour exploited by the Spaniards for several centuries.

As someone with a wildly eclectic CV, who has regularly devoted more time and effort to voluntary work than paid work and who has been self- or un-employed for about a year now (the line is fuzzy), I like this distinction. In English, when people ask me what do you do, the implication is always what my paid job is, but that’s never been particularly well-defined nor interesting to me. I shared a line that I like from poet Kahlil Gibran: work is love made visible.

Obviously, complaining against wage labour is one thing, but people gotta eat. In capitalism, that means they gotta work to get money to not starve. Any attempt to build an alternative system needs to provide a solution to this. For the Zapatistas, as a rural movement composed predominantly of subsistence farmers, this can partly solve itself: people grow what they need, and eat that. Excess is produced and shared with those who can’t produce for themselves, and responsibilities are shared and rotated to allow people time to attend political meetings, produce crafts, babysit us, etc.

The other part of the Zapatista economy, and probably more relevant to we non-farmers, is the prevalence of cooperatives and collectives. Co-operatives are a worldwide phenomena and a surprisingly large one at that: there are some 3 million co-ops in the world and roughly 12% of the world’s population work with them. In co-ops, worker-members simultaneously work for the co-op and own it, ensuring that the benefits of success accrue to those responsible for them. There are no bosses and no extraction of surplus value. Co-ops also usually provide a range of other social services for members, such as low- or no-interest loans for times of financial difficulty.

Photo by the author

There are several caracoles (Spanish for snail) within the MAREZ. They serve as a sort of meeting place-cum-social space-cum-interface with the outside world; when they were first created in 2003, they were described as being like doors which allow entry to communities and which allow the communities to exit; like windows so that people can look inside and so that we can see outside; like megaphones to project our words into the distance and to hear the voice of the one that is far away. But above all to remind us that we should watch over and be responsive to the totality of the worlds that populate the world.

Photo by the author

Both the snail and spiral iconography are important in the Mayan culture, I was told. For one, the traditional way to convoke a meeting in a Mayan community was to blow on a big spiral horn, with the number of blows corresponding to the message being sent: one meant a meeting of all the men, two meant a meeting of everyone, three meant danger, etc. For this reason, the shell shape has become a symbol of communication. Snails also carry their homes on their backs, and can retreat into them when danger appears. The caracoles are similar; when danger threatens a community, the caracoles become a place of safety and refuge.

He also told me that snails are inoffensive animals that don’t attack others. Similarly, the Zapatistas have no interest in conquering others or forcing people to join the movement; one of their core principles translates to to convince, not conquer.³ This can obviously be a slow process, and the promotor said that some criticise the Zapatistas for moving slowly. To that they say they go at their speed, like the snail; neither quickly nor slowly. Lastly, the spiral shape of the snail’s shell represents the Mayan conception of time as circular, rather than linear. Capitalism’s (and, I should mention, Marxism’s) notions of time as a march of progress towards some objective contrast with the indigenous view of it, which makes sense for agrarian communities dependent on the passage of the seasons and still living in ways similar to how they have for the best part of a millennium.

Photo by the author

The caracol itself (formally Caracol II, as it was the second to be constructed) is built on the side of a hill. Oventik itself isn’t residential, but it houses offices for several Zapatista projects. There’s a long, steep road down the centre with the various project offices off to either side. At the bottom is a clearing with a stage (and basketball court) for outdoor events, and off to the side is the autonomous secondary school that also houses the CELMRAZ. And another basketball court; the Zapatistas really like basketball. On a ridge overlooking the school is an auditorium, which hosts political events, film screenings and more. There are consejos autónomos (sort of the legislative bodies, and generally only gathered together when something needs discussing) for two of the nearby communities, and the office of this municipality’s junta de bien gobierno (sort of the executive body, and permanently staffed).

Caracol II is in the community of Oventik (or Oventic, but they prefer the Mayan spelling), which is in turn one of 44 communities within the rebel municipality of San Andrés Sacamch’en de los Pobres. That, in turn, is one of 7 municipalities in Zona Altos de Chiapas, which is one of the 9 zones that make up the MAREZ. The MAREZ comprised around 360,000 people in 2018, but it’s worth nothing that each of those municipalities also contains settlements that aren’t formally pro-Zapatista, but are either largely sympathetic or still make use of the services provided by the autonomous government.

Later in the day we had another conversation about how we first learned about the Zapatistas, followed by a discussion of the history of Panama and the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua.

We ended the day with a documentary, Oventic: Construyendo dignidad, about the construction of the caracol we were in. Construction began in late 1995, and was completed a couple of months later on December 31^st. The work was all done by hand by a huge group that brought together a range of different indigenous groups (many of whom lacked a common language), and continued in the face of constant harassment by the military. In the documentary we saw the community down tools and line up along the road to hurl abuse at the military convoys that drove past every day for the duration of the construction. Details of each vehicle popped up on screen, including their armaments and countries of origin: France; Switzerland; the US.

In a lot of the world, globalisation and foreign investment looks like a French-made tank tread rolling through your fields or a hunk of shrapnel with Made in the US on its side hurtling towards your face.

Day Two ¶

Photo by the author

We started the day with a hike up into the mountains so we could look back down on Oventik and place it into its geographical context. Then we spoke about the Other Campaign and did an activity around it, each taking on the role of a different part of the Other sector and describing how capitalism affected us, after which the others had to guess which group we were.

The Zapatistas emerged from the struggle of indigenous people in southern Mexico for their rights and autonomy, and for the first decade or so following the uprising it remained an insular movement. Even so, foreign support for and continued interest in the movement served as a form of protection that dissuaded the the Mexican government from getting too heavy-handed (generally). But in 2006, the Zapatistas launched the Other Campaign. Mexicans voted out the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in the 2000 elections, marking the first time the opposition parties had won an election since the Mexican Revolution almost a century prior. Mexican presidential terms are 6 years long, and so 2006 marked the next election.

There was an atmosphere of excitement, opportunity and political ferment. The Other Campaign represented the Zapatistas’ realisation that their struggle was not unique, and they did not struggle alone, but was instead one battleground of many in the fight against capitalism and the state system. In the Other Campaign, they sent their de facto spokesman on a tour of Mexico, meeting with hundreds of groups representing other such marginalised and exploited groups: workers; women; gender, sexual and relationship minorities (GSRMs); students; and more. Together they identified the similar (and unique) ways in which the system affected their lives, with the goal of forming networks of support and solidarity and pressuring the Mexican government to reject capitalism and neoliberalism.

For no doubt completely unrelated reasons, the winner of the 2006 election ended the year by sending the Mexican Army into Michoacán state to fight against the drug cartels there (though the homicide rate in Mexico had actually been dropping since 2000). This was the first such deployment and is generally regarded as the start of the Mexican drug war that we all now know and love. Communities were disrupted, violence rose sharply and the Mexican state massively increased its military and paramilitary presence in much of the country. But despite the best efforts of the state, many of the links formed during the Other Campaign have endured and it remains an important moment in the history of both the movement and Mexico.

Later I had a grammar lesson, focussing on pronominal verbs. Spanish has some verbs where the meaning changes depending on whether there is a reflexive pronoun (e.g. , myself, yourself and ourselves in English) is placed before it or not. For example, duermo (from dormir) means I sleep whilst me duermo means I rest or I let my guard down. This being a radical language school, this was taught using sentences like los zapatistas no pueden se dormir por el mal gobierno.

Lastly, for the conversational part of the day, we talked about health and the Zapatista healthcare system. There’s a hospital and a clinic within the caracol, complete with a couple of ambulances, and the work of the promotores de salud is endlessly inspiring. Like with all responsibilities in the autonomous government, the role of promotor is an elected role, unpaid and reassigned on a rotating basis.

The Zapatista system attempts to combine the advantages of modern medicine with the long-standing traditional medicine of the communities. The promotor explained that traditional Mayan healthcare recognised four distinct areas of expertise: the curander@; the hueser@; the parter@; and the yerbater@.⁴ For centuries, those were all that were needed; between them, the societal support networks and the strong sense of community, everything just worked (though I suspect life expectancy stats and the like don’t exist for much of this time).

Photo by the author

Capitalism, and the damage it wrought on those traditional community ties, introduced new conditions, as well as the supposed solutions to them. For example, he said that Coca-Cola was often promoted as having medicinal properties. As a result of this deception (Chiapas has the highest rate of Coke consumption in Mexico, the country with the highest rate in the world) rates of diabetes have skyrocketed. People were then sold pharmaceuticals that would alleviate their symptoms, whilst the underlying issue went unaddressed. This coincides with what I was told at Hospitalito Atitlán, where (though they were by no means radical in their analysis) they identified sudden and relatively recent changes in how people lived (i.e. , from outdoor work to more sedentary living) as a major force behind the epidemic of diabetes. Zapatista healthcare services are open to all, and apparently many non-Zapatistas nonetheless prefer to use them over the state alternatives.

I pointed out that modern medicine can also claim many genuine successes, such as the eradication of smallpox and polio. He agreed, and said that the Zapatistas were by no means against modern medicine in general; only its elevation above all other forms of healing, and its separation from the community as something other, specialised and impenetrably technical. The Zapatistas, he said, view health as comprising much more than just bodily health, but also mental health, social relationships, a sense of purpose, etc. They also focus on preventative work as much as possible; I attempted to translate the phrase an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure into Spanish (and the metric system).

I also told him about Shit Life Syndrome, the idea within the more radical parts of the UK/US healthcare sector that many conditions that are on the rise in those countries—depression, suicide, reduced life expectancy—are inseparable from the socioeconomic conditions in which people are living, and that treating them in isolation without also working for political change is pointless. He told me about the Mayan concept of ch’ulel, which broadly seems to be some sort of life force (like the Chinese idea of qi, or the Austin Powers concept of mojo, baby) that they believe can be diminished by things like kanal and regained via a’mtel. People lacking ch’ulel drink a lot of Coke or a lot of alcohol as a substitute, he said; recognising capitalist ideology for what it is is both a result and cause of increased ch’ulel.⁵

Photo by the author

In the (poetic, beautiful, often hilarious) writings of the Zapatistas there is a recurring character called Defensa Zapatista: a precocious, radical young girl who spends her days playing football and hanging out with a cat-dog, a one-eyed horse and several others. When we went up into the mountains to discuss the Other Campaign, the promotores’ young kids came with us. That gave me the opportunity to snap this, which I think sums up the magic of Zapatismo: a six-year-old girl taking time out of her busy schedule of looking for bugs to sit and listen to a bunch of adults criticising capitalism. Then, back to the bugs.

Mayan child-rearing practices are periodically highlighted in Western media, and they were interesting to observe in Oventik. From their earliest age, children are encouraged to observe household chores, their parents’ work, etc. and to try and help. Play for Mayan children largely consists of miming chores, rather than imaginary space adventuring and transmogrification. There is no age segregation in community life, and Mayan children attend events with people of all generations. They even get involved in the muralling.

Photo by the author

We also played a board game (how did they know how to laser-target my interests so well‽) that was designed by the collective of promotores here at the language centre. It was a bit like a radical Candy Land, as the players take turns rolling a dice to see how many squares they’ll move with the goal of reaching the nuevo mundo in the centre of the snail’s shell. Along the way they land on squares that have them explaining Zapatista organising principles to the group, retreating back to the nearest caracol, obeying tasks decided by the rest of the group (I had to play ditty on guitar one time, and only the fourth one I tried was actually in tune), etc. 

Day Three ¶

My grammar lesson revolved around two forms of the pretérito past tense. Spanish is a funky language, with a bunch of tenses that are functionally the same but which differ in what I can only describe as the vibe. For example, hablé is the simple past form of hablar and used for factual information, whilst hablaba is also I spoke but has some hard-to-define sense of being more sensual, or subjective (and so now I keep thinking of the preterite perfect as the sexy tense). Truth be told, I’m not sure the distinction is something that’ll ever be clear as a non-native speaker, but we had an interesting conversation and I even wrote a short story to practice.

For the conversation part of the day, the promotor explained how Tsotsil has two different words for we: jo’utik and jo’ukutik. The former refers to a collective body, whilst the latter refers to a sub-component of that body. For example, within a family jo’utik would refer to all of the family members whilst ju’ukutik would refer to just you. When talking about your community, however, jo’utik would mean the community as a whole whilst jo’ukutik would refer to your family within it. So on up for your municipality/community, zone/municipality, state/zone, country/state. And ditto for the other way, in theory, for you/your cells, your cells/their chemical components, etc.  (although obviously there aren’t many situations where you would be referring to your cells in the second person). All this reminded me of a book I read some time ago and its idea of the holon.

Photo by the author

He asked me to describe the relationship that I saw between the Zapatistas and the flowers nearby. I talked about the need for the latter to break up the monotony of a grass field; about the large root systems invisible under the surface; and the fact that each plant has many flowers, and one being cut off doesn’t spell the end for the plant. I asked about the pre-Spanish history of the Maya, about which I knew pretty much nothing. He said that Mayan society had been highly hierarchical 1,000 years ago (from when many of the ruins that remain today date), but the people eventually decided that they had had enough of kings and rulers, and so moved out of the cities and into tiny rural communities during an event known as la disperción (I did a little looking around online after this, and this would seem to be around the time of the unexplained ‘Classical Maya collapse’). When the Spanish arrived some 500 years later, they were shocked to find communities without chiefs or soldiers, who routinely rotated roles between themselves.

I finished by asking about the Zapatista approach to justice. He described how the autonomous government and the official government overlap in many places, and explained that when an issue is only internal to the movement, it is dealt with solely by the autonomous government, but when an issue arises that affects others, or is otherwise relevant to them, the autonomous government will work together with the official government, the church and whomever else has an interest. Ultimately, he said, a problem in the community is not just a problem for Zapatistas; it’s a problem for the community and that the ultimate judge is the community. Todos somos policias, he added.

I asked what happens in cases of violent crime and robbery. Murder was the highest crime, he said, and would result in the most severe punishment available: expulsion from one’s community, with the message passed on to all others to deny entry to the offender. The expellee’s possessions are then redistributed amongst the community. Similarly, working for a paramilitary would incur this sanction, as would sexual crimes after a third offence. The Zapatistas do not allow the death penalty, but they also have no faith in the Mexican justice system. The promotor told me about a paramilitary attack in Santa Marta a couple months earlier after which the government declared it would not be able to find the perpetrators; the community flew into action and rounded them up shortly thereafter. He also said there had been many cases where the government would make a big show of arresting the paramilitaries, stick them in jail for a few weeks and then quietly release them back into the community to cause more damage.

For less serious offences (for example, assault), the attacker would be made to pay for any medical expenses for the victim, as well as to work their land for the duration of their recovery, and whatever else the community deemed necessary to make amends. I’ve also read of instances where the community has decided to impose a part-time sentence so that the accused could continue to work their own land to feed their family, on the grounds that if we simply put them in jail, those who really suffer are the family members; the guilty just rest all day in jail and gain weight, but their families are the ones who have to work the cornfield and figure out how to survive. There may be a requirement to attend educational events, particularly in the case of offences against women. The Zapatista justice system, then, aims to be restorative rather than punitive. They do have a police role, but like all roles it is unpaid, elected and undertaken on a rotating basis.

Day Four ¶

We started with another grammar lesson, continuing to focus on those two past tenses and dabbling a little with the subjunctive mood.

For the conversation, I started by asking what makes people decide to join paramilitaries and fight against Zapatismo, when it seems like it’s going against their own interests. The promotor told me about his own uncle who had decided to start a small paramilitary that began causing issues with Zapatistas in the local community (but that the community correctly identified them, rather than the Zapatistas, as the source of the problems, and now the uncle is banished to San Cristóbal). As for the motivation, he explained that there are five political parties in Mexico, and each promises (and in some cases even provides) their supporters with money, food, a social safety net and the opportunity to climb the ranks and gain power. They succeed by dividing the people, whilst Zapatismo succeeds by uniting them, and therein lies the irreconcilable conflict.

I was also curious about what would happen in the event of a bad harvest within the MAREZ, given how agrarian the movement is. He explained to me that the promotores put a lot of effort into providing workshops where people can come to learn ecological techniques for farming without pesticides, or for co-planting different things to promote better soil health. He told me about some new coffee weevil that had arrived at some point in the last decade that was quite a problem, and about traditional techniques of leaving root systems during harvest and dividing plots into thin strips with fencing, which retain and catch soil in the event of heavy rain (as most plots here are on the side of a hill). At first I thought he had misunderstood or evaded the question, but then I realised his answer made sense in the context of focussing on prevention rather than the cure, which we had discussed the day before.

Lastly, he told me about the system of organising responsibilities, or a’mtel patan in Tsotsil. All of the various cargos—from the promotores of heath and education, to media work, to the administration of the juntas de buen gobierno to community policing—rotate regularly, without regard to age (provided they’re an adult), gender, sexual orientation, etc.  All roles are voluntary and require the support of the community; similarly, someone can withdraw at any time. If someone is shown to be manifestly unfit for a role, the community that elected them can also withdraw them, and they can then try their hand at something else instead (in this respect it’s not too dissimilar to being a UK Cabinet minister). The roles are unpaid and taking them imparts no special privileges.

The promotor compared this to the imposed government of the state (ajvalil in Tsotsil), which rotates roles between a small privileged group. The root of that word—ajval—means chief/boss/sir, and within Chiapas often refers to the twenty-five families who dominate the state politically and economically, all of whom trace their lineage back to the Spanish conquistadores (or, as the promotores regularly stressed from their own perspective, the invasores).⁶

Photo by the author

We finished the day with a documentary about the 1997 Acteal massacre—Acteal: Estrategia de muerte—which the promotores framed against the recent upsurge of paramilitary violence as part of a continual campaign of repression coming from the Mexican government. On top of the deadly attack on the village of Polhó last week, one promotor also told us about a police chief from his home village who had been killed the week before, though by whom no-one was certain.

The Zapatistas are well aware that the strategy of the mal gobierno, especially under AMLO at the moment, is to stir up trouble within the various communities in order to try and provoke the EZLN into responding, which would then be used as justification for a massive military response. This, they reckon, is why the recent spate of attacks have not just targeted Zapatistas and their families (as in the past), but the communities in general, regardless of allegiance: the government just wants to sow chaos and discord, and insinuate that the Zapatistas are to blame. This is borne out in the government messaging, which talks constantly about intercommunity conflicts and conflates the EZLN with the cartels and paramilitaries that operate within the state.

It seems to be working, to an extent, and the promotores said that their communities, which had previously been supportive of their work with the movement and understanding of their need to divide their time between the community and the movement, were starting to apply more pressure on them to choose between the two obligations. That is an incredibly difficult position for them to be put in as, from their perspective (and, I think, pretty evidently from what I’ve seen) their communities benefit greatly from the work of the movement, but one should never underestimate people’s willingness to act contrary to their own interests when frightened.

The Zapatistas, and the EZLN in particular, are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place: not responding becomes increasingly difficult as attacks increase in number, scale and blatancy, but any action will be seized on to ramp up the repression and violence. Their best bet is to draw international attention to what is happening as much as they’re able, which is why they had called an global day of action for that first week I was in Oventik. The hope is that by highlighting the actions of the Mexican state and keeping foreign eyes on the region, they can deter any escalation.

Will it work? I don’t know. I think that if the government really wants to pick a fight (and its commitment to several megaprojects in the region suggests that it does) and it can’t provoke the response it wants, it’ll find a way to conjure up some other excuse. I think the present moment may be amongst the most perilous that the movement has faced, not least of all because AMLO is currently subject to a love-in from much of the international Left. But the path the Zapatistas chose to take all those years ago has never been easy to walk, and their success never guaranteed. But they’ll keep organising, as they have done all along, undaunted by the danger because (to quote Subcomandante Marcos) the heart lies below and to the left.

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Day Five ¶

In the grammar lesson we focused on my pronunciation by singing a song—La mar estaba serena—with the lyrics changed to reflect some sort of US–Latin America fishing dispute from the 1970s. La mar estaba serena / Serena estaba la mar became Los yanquis quieren robarnos / Doscientas millas de mar. Then we worked on reflexive verbs. One of the greatest difficulties with Spanish is that many verbs have many different meanings, and at their most complex these meanings can even be opposite to one another and dependent on context, whether you’re using the transitive or reflexive form of the verb, whether you have a pronominal pronoun, etc.  For example, just check out this list of possible meanings for levantar.

For the conversation part of the day, I asked the promotora what Che Guevara, whose face adorns many of the walls in the caracol, means to her and to the Zapatista movement as a whole. She recognised that whilst many of the things that he fought for (as a Marxist–Leninist) are antithetical to the objectives of the Zapatistas, they can nonetheless learn from his mistakes as they do all past revolutionaries, never simply accepting them uncritically.

Then we talked about the intergenerational nature of the struggle. She had been brought up by Zapatista parents and attended an autonomous secondary school the moment one was set up, and the other promotor (her husband) had spent his childhood in the mid-’90s taking food and other supplies up to the guerrillas in the mountains during the initial uprising. This, the promotora said, was a reflection of the way the indigenous communities have always worked: intergenerational households were the norm, and it was traditional for someone to live together with their parents and children and to jointly manage their shared plots of land.

She said that this was the case with her husband, and the two lived with his parents and their two young children. I asked if it was always the case that the wife moved in with her husband’s parents and she said it was; I commented that that must be difficult for parents who have only daughters, and she agreed. The fight against such traditions that disadvantage women is the struggle within the struggle, she said. For example, it was traditional for parents to split their lands between their children when they died, but daughters would receive a much smaller share (though, she added, there were practical reasons for this, as women are less physically able to work the land and so are traditionally relegated to home-making, cooking, childcare, etc. ). However, in Zapatista communities, inheritance must be split equally between sons and daughters. This was just one example of the efforts of the movement to improve the lot of women, dating all the way back to its founding and the Women’s Revolutionary Law.

We then spoke a bit about how the communities had experienced the coronavirus pandemic. She said that it had been very difficult, as poverty and lifestyles mean many indigenous people already have several health conditions, diabetes chief amongst these. In addition, she said many had refused vaccination, in part due to misinformation they had found online or in the media and in part due to a (pretty understandable) distrust of the mal gobierno. The promotores de salud were working to educate people around this, and to provide a more trusted source for medical information for a deeply sceptical community, but it was an uphill struggle.

For the final activity of the week, we took turns sharing stories and legends from our own areas. I shared the legend of Hereward the Wake, and then the story of the 1974 East Kilbride Rolls-Royce factory strike that grounded half the Chilean Air Force following the fascist coup under Pinochet the year before (dry summary here; song version here). The others shared tales of man-eating wolves, Mayan spirits and a bison herd off the coast of California. And just like that, my first week at the CELMRAZ was complete.

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Studying at the CELMRAZ costs money, which all goes to the junta del buen gobierno to spend on its various projects. In the afternoon, we all headed over to pay for the week just past. After some waiting, we were beckoned into the gloomy, warm room. With a huge drawing of Subcomandante Marcos lighting his pipe looking over us, the three guys behind the desk took a look at our accreditation papers and took down the details. Then came the payment; the junta del buen gobierno take administrative matters very seriously, and the three guys (all of whom were, as with all Zapatista cargos, unpaid volunteers who would be rotated for others after a couple of weeks) meticulously double- and triple-checked everything, including running calculations separately on different calculators to ensure that they all agreed on how much change we were due. The caracol had also been without power since about midday the day before, and one of the guys had been impressed by a chargeable lamp that one of the other students had brought, from which one could also charge phones and suchlike. She said she had several and asked if they wanted some for the caracol; the guy said he would ask the others on the junta what they thought. No decision can be made unilaterally, it seems.

San Cristóbal es Mi Casa ¶

Me and the other language students returned to San Cris and went out for a night of craft beers, mezcal and pox. Amongst the many street salesmen of San Cris, the strangest I saw was a man who seemed to be flogging bells to couples seated outside cafes, which I can’t imagine is a very successful gambit. At one point we heard a commotion in the streets and looked out from the balcony of our bar to see a parade of partidistas—I think for MORENA, the party of AMLO—banging drums and blowing trumpets. Just as with Guatemala before it, and Arizona long before that, I’d managed to arrive in the midst of election season.

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I found out, seven months after applying, that I hadn’t got the job in Antarctica I’d been waiting to hear back from. The mild disappointment was tempered by the relief from being finally able to plan my post-return activities. The main activity of the week was a pair of workshops on the political situation in Chiapas, delivered by the Espacio de Lucha Contra el Olvido y la Represión (ELCOR), which were a pre-requisite to my post-CELMRAZ plans. I also settled into a daily food routine that saw me visit Las Carmelitas for their desayano del día offer, and then La Esquina del Chaparro in the mid-afternoon for their large (and filling) menú del día; through these, I think I had a good sampling of Mexican and Chiapan (and Oaxacan) cuisine.

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I stayed at Fandango again, and found that pretty much everyone who had been there before my week at the Centre was still there. The place was rather odd: there seemed to be a sizeable contingent of long-term residents (one guy referred to the money he was paying for accommodation as rent) and some of the inhabitants were a touch kooky. My favourite was a guy who perpetually wore a crop top string vest, along with anywhere up to seven bags and pouches dotted around his body (including, at one point, a utility belt with a small bongo attached). Of course, he also wore a fedora complete with decorative steampunk goggles, and offered people massages apropos of nothing. I started my week-long stay back in the MDF coffins, but soon promoted myself to the MDF castle above:

I took advantage of the weekend salsa lessons at the hostel, and met up with a couple of the CELMRAZ crew back at La Enredadera for a documentary screening of Lupita, followed by a Q&A with the woman herself.

CELMRAZ, Week Two ¶

After my week off, I headed back to Oventik for another week of Spanish study.

Day Six ¶

We kicked off the first day of my second week here at the CELMRAZ by running through the geopolitical situation in Chiapas again, for the benefit of the handful of the new students: we are up to eight from five in my first week. In the grammar lesson, we clarified a couple of near-synonymous words (e.g. , aún and todavía for still), but mostly just ended up having a conversation about Chiapas’ history (it was originally part of Guatemala). I immediately missed my one-on-one tuition from the first week; there were three of us in my Spanish class now, plus the promotor.

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In the conversation we talked more about Zapatismo and the movement. When you say ¡ya basta! there are consequences, said the promotor. He talked about how there are no plans, only the people in constant rebellion. I asked about the agrarian nature of Zapatismo, and how much it applied to urban society. We talked a bit about how the largely agrarian EZLN originated within the more urban Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (FLN) in the ’70s, and the many disappearances during the Dirty War in Mexico. Whilst Zapatismo certainly has a lot of support in San Cristóbal, the promotor said that la ciudad es mas cerca la bocas del lobo and was dangerous.

We watched a documentary in the evening called Storm from the Mountains: The Zapatistas Take Mexico City, about their march on the capital in 2001 to found the Congreso Nacional Indígena (CNI). It’s a real shame that it’s not available anywhere online, because it was full of fantastic Subcomandante Marcos speeches and incredible scenes, chief amongst them an extended sequence in which a huge crowd of unarmed Zapatistas storm a military barracks, getting into fistfights with bayonet-wielding Mexican soldiers without a care in the world (though you can at least get a sense of the speeches from the trailer linked above). Plus, the soundtrack absolutely slapped in a deliciously early-2000s way.

Day Seven ¶

We started by heading back up into the mountains along with 25-odd students from the autonomous secondary school (there were about 40–50 at school that week, so the caracol was a lot less tranquil). There we sang songs (me and the two Americans contributed an all-baritone rendition of the Diggers’ Song) and danced a conga line in the forest: in Zapatismo, everything is possible.

For the grammar part of the day, we played a game invented by the Surrealists in which pairs of cards forming conditional sentences (e.g. , if wishes were fishes and we’d all swim in riches) are divided up and mixed and we each took turns drawing them to form new sentences: some profound, some funny, some meaningless. We ended up talking about co-operative board games and the way the autonomous secondary school uses Monopoly to teach the students about how capitalism works. We also looked at the history of Mayan resistance stretching back to 1712 uprisings and rebellion of Jacinto Canek against the Spanish. We were taught the term el mandón, which means something akin to the bossy one. The people of Chiapas have called many things el mandón over the centuries: in 1994, el mandón was neoliberalism; in 2005, el mandón was capitalism. All of this, said the promotor, went back to the cultural memory of the Mayan collapse and the new forms of living that had to be developed following it.

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To start our conversational practice, we were told to go off and find something—a space, a tree, a plant, whatever—and to have a conversation with it for ten minutes. I found a nice clearing with a little abandoned house and sat listening to the birds, the insects and the wind whilst wondering what exactly I was supposed to be doing. When we got back together, the promotora explained that Tsotsil does not have any word that is the equivalent of things, only existencias. This is because the language apparently doesn’t have the concept of a grammatical object; the closest I can get to explaining how this works is to say that rather than saying I write with my pen on this notebook, you would be saying something like Me, the pen and the notebook together write.⁷

We also looked at the concept of ch’ulel again, with the promotora explaining in the context of what we’d just learnt that it is the result of the mutual recognition of existences (so maybe more like the inner light in Quakerism than Austin Powers’ mojo). She explained that in Mayan culture, one would ritualistically speak to a tree before cutting it town in order to ask its permission (I’m not quite sure how you’re supposed to gauge that the tree is cool with the chopping, though). But ch’ulel also seems to mean something like conscience. She said that it is always present, but sometimes only very small; I asked whether paramilitaries have ch’ulelito, which got a chuckle.

Day Eight ¶

We started the day off clearing vegetation from the coffee field, and as I’d done very little physical activity recently I ended up sore for the remainder of the week.

In the grammar lesson we played the Surrealist game again, but with cards we had written ourselves. I mentioned how anthropologists have described Mayan kids as not taking part in imaginative play as much as their counterparts in places like the US, and the promotor explained how the children here live in close connection to nature and within the Mayan cosmovision, so they don’t need to invent unicorns. We also looked at a few Spanish idioms, because I was keen to transition from talking good English-with-Spanish-words to actually speaking Spanish.

In the conversation the other two students asked a bunch of questions about how the cargos and juntas de buen gobierno work, which I had already covered in the first week. Week one was definitely the better of the two.

Day Nine ¶

For my penultimate day at the school, I wanted to find out more about the theoretical side of the Zapatista movement. The EZLN Wikipedia page describes them as Marxist (amongst several other things) and I’d already had a conversation in my first week about why there were so many pictures of Che Guevara’s face. The promotor said that Zapatismo is a practice, not an ideology, philosophy, doctrine or theory. He talked about how the symbolic references for a movement depend on where it is, and talked about how Latin Americans often comprehend things sensually, rather than rationally. He quoted Surrealist Andre Breton who, upon arriving in Mexico and seeing a cow walking in front of a cathedral, apparently declared that This is Surrealism!

We also talked about Zapata’s agrarian reform and the Mexican Constitution, and discussed how land ownership and work distribution work in Zapatista communities, delineating collective work (i.e. , the necessities of the community, like building schools), communal work (e.g. , seed planting) and co-operative work (e.g. , the shops in the caracol, which operate to generate money).

The distinction between the grammar classes and the conversations was pretty fuzzy all of this week.

In the actual conversation part of the day, we talked about the concept of buen vivir (literally living well, or more idiomatically the good life). The Zapatistas recognise that this is the goal of any liberatory movement and that it will look different in very culture, person, etc.  The promotor talked about industrial society as new and superficially nice-looking, but in reality it creates perceived needs that everyone got along fine without before, and creates new problems that it claims to be the solution to.

She talked about health problems in this context, pointing to the increases in diabetes and cancers. Diabetes (as I’ve talked about before) is pretty clearly linked to lifestyle changes, but increasing cancer rates are generally related to people living longer and thus having more time to develop them. On this note, I asked her whether there is a similar concept of buen mourir, because there are certainly people who argue that just living as long as we possibly can is missing the point. She talked about the Mayan approach to death, seeing it as a passing to another dimension or place, and the Zapatista idea of a dignified death within the struggle (not necessarily in combat).

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Lastly, we talked about the next generation of Zapatistas, currently studying at our very location. I had heard elsewhere that some 90% of young people in Zapatista communities choose to get involved in the movement, and they were certainly enthusiastic singing the songs up in the mountains the other day, but financial realities and the deteriorating security situation are also leading to a lot of young emigration to the US for work.

Day Ten ¶

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My final day at the CELMRAZ began with a conversation session. I asked about how the autonomous secondary school works, and what a typical day looks like for the students. The promotora explained that the students board for two weeks each month for around 2–3 months at a time, and are split into groups who take it in turns to be responsible for communal tasks (cooking, chopping wood, etc.). They attend classes from 9 till 5 (although sometimes we would be woken up around 5:30 by them playing basketball or guitar, because they’re used to getting up at the crack of dawn back home). From 3 till 5 they’re free, and then they get back together for a group activity between 5 and 7.

She said that some of the promotores were barely older than the students, and would often get involved in basketball, etc.  too. After three years of secondary education, the students then choose an autonomous project to get involved with, be that with the health system, education system, media collectives, etc.  In theory they could go straight to work for the junta de buen gobierno, but she said they usually start with something smaller unless they have a lot of experience already.

The classes provided include maths, history, humanism, social sciences, natural sciences, physical education, art, languages and health (which includes sex education, which is traditionally never addressed in most of the communities). Students sleep in gender-segregated rooms, but the school is otherwise co-educational. Men and women were traditionally prohibited from working together, so this is another way in which the movement is changing people’s perceptions: things are always improving poco a poco.

Whilst this is the only autonomous secondary school for the whole zone (hence the boarding; students came here from all different municipalities), the autonomous primaries are dotted around every municipality and students don’t board at them. She said there was no strict starting age for those, and that kids were welcome to start attending whenever they wanted, or even to attend specific subjects if that was all they were interested in.

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Then we talked about how food production works in the MAREZ. Our zone, Zona Alta, struggles due to having little fertile land. Fertiliser is a necessity, and the promotora said that the bad government provides chemical fertiliser from Monsanto along with seeds. These are bad for the land, but people need to make enough food; she said this one of the primary drivers behind emigration to the US. Other zones within the MAREZ, though, produce all they need and even a bit of surplus.

Chiapas does not lack for fertile land, but the bulk of it is held by the large-scale rancheros and finceros; we again returned to the twenty-five rich families that appropriated that land under the conquistadores and continue to dominate state politics now. The promotora also acknowledged that life was not perfect before the Spanish conquest, but that a lot of conservative practices that they are fighting in the communities were not originally Mayan, and instead were introduced by the Spaniards (see also, the role of women in the British Isles pre- and post-Normans).

For the final grammar lesson, we actually did a bit of grammar! We touched on conditionals, the subjunctive mood and various irregular verbs, as well as how to pronounce the ü that occasionally appears in Spanish words. Then we all reviewed a piece of homework I’d been given over my week off, in which I practised two types of past tense by writing about my main man Albert Camus. Given that I was in a class with the Franco–Belgian couple, that led to a final conversational digression on the subject of French and Belgian colonialism. We finished with one last song, La hierba de los caminos, which ends with the following stanza:

¿Cuándo querrá el Dios del cielo
que la tortilla se vuelva
(¿Cuándo querrá Dios del cielo
que la tortilla se vuelva)

Que la tortilla se vuelva
que los pobres coman pan
y los ricos mierda, mierda?
(que la tortilla se vuelva
que los pobres coman pan
y los ricos mierda, mierda?)

Lastly but by no means leastly, we spend a chunk of time in the afternoon learning how to make tortillas.

It Was the Worst of Times… ¶

I spent the Monday of the following week at the first of two more preparatory workshops for my next activity in Chiapas. In them we covered… the history and geopolitical context of Chiapas! For like the third or fourth time now!

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I was very hungry at 12, even hungrier at 1:15 when we finally broke for lunch and so hungry by the time the others had finished nattering at 1:40 that I shouted when I was told that the guy leading the workshop wanted to join us after picking his son up from school, so we wouldn’t even be ordering until 2. In any case, he arrived late.

We went to a vegan café that my compa suggested; they didn’t have any choice, it was the menu of the day or bust. The meal on the board actually sounded great—stuffed plantains—but that was yesterday’s meal: we got a thin broccoli soup and a meal I could best describe as appetiser-esque. I tried to get some money out, but I think it was some sort of social service payout day and there were queues around the block for every cash machine.

We returned for more workshop, but no more Spanish was going into my brain at this point. Back at the housing co-op I was staying at, they had a house assembly that evening. Despite my best efforts and the fact I was only staying there for four nights, attendance was mandatory (I was not told about any of this before I arrived). Already cranky, I had to sit and listen to a bunch of people I barely knew and wouldn’t have the time to get to know check in with their biggest adventure of the week and discuss housing matters that had little to no relevance to me.

One of the housemates had been ill, and I’d picked up her cold so spent the night spluttering on my own sinus juice instead of sleeping. By the following morning it had gotten worse, and I only had so many sachets of Lemsip. I spent what little time I had that morning playing musical showers because none of them had hot water.

I went to collect the laundry I’d left at the launderette on Saturday, and which I’d been told would be ready by the Monday just past. They didn’t open till 9, so I went out for a breakfast of (cold) scrambled eggs. When I came back, they said they wouldn’t be ready until the afternoon, and that they closed at 2: based on the previous day’s experience, I wouldn’t be back in time to pick them up, so I took the unwashed clothes and settled into day 3 of my current pair of pants.

The cash machines still had massive queues that morning, so no money for me. The cold was doing my head in, and on the walk back to our place for a long lunch break I smashed my toe into the kerb and had to walk halfway across the city with my flip-flop getting increasingly sticky with blood. I got back in time to have collected my laundry, had I left it at the launderette.

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Of course the pinche washing machine in the pinche house was only for the pinche housekeeper. And of course the pinche housekeeper left 20 minutes before I was told that, so I couldn’t ask her for a favour. And of course the only pinche launderette that was open charged me six times as much as the original one to get my clothes done by that pinche evening. And of course it took me a pinche hour to find a pinche cash machine that hadn’t been drained that pinche morning.

Sometimes you have a period of time where everything is pretty shitty. I was two days into one, and if I hadn’t have vented (on my tracker) I’dve screamed. I was excited to be rid of San Cris the following day.

BriCO Boys ¶

The next morning, I headed out with a German compa (who, coincidentally enough, I had met at the CELMRAZ my second week there) to the hamlet of Acteal. We were to spend two weeks there as a two-man team of human rights observers, as part of the Brigadas Civiles De Observación (BriCOs) (original Spanish here; English version here).

Acteal itself isn’t a Zapatista community, but it’s run by a sympathetic Christan pacifist group called las Abejas who are organised similarly, with health and education promotores, rotating positions, etc.  The settlement itself sits slap-bang in the middle of the multi-directional Chiapan conflict that I’d been learning about for the past few weeks. Nearby villages have received an influx of people displaced from other villages in the region (such as Polhó), cartels and other criminal groups funnel drugs, arms and humans through the area and a suspiciously well-armed autodefensa militia recently appeared in the nearby town of Pantelhó, who nobody seemed to trust. There was also some sort of other armed group in the area that didn’t have a name and nobody knew much about. On top of this was all the usual murky involvement and harassment from the police and military. The Abejas’ dogged campaigning finally resulted in the Mexican government admitting responsibility for the massacre in 2020, but they continue to push for the then-President (and several other intellectual authors of the crime) to be tried in court.

We were in Acteal to document any human rights abuses or security issues and to keep the organisation that was sending us—the Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas—informed about the developing situation. We were stuck within the small camp pretty much the whole time—the road outside was considered unsafe, as was just about all of the surrounding area—so I loaded up my e-reader with books, my laptop with films and my luggage with a guitar.

Our arrival coincided with a multi-day fiesta for San Pedro, the patron saint of this region. We were treated to a brass band, fireworks, chicken soup and locally-made coffee, and drinking the water here (although after it had been boiled) didn’t seem to do us any harm. Most importantly, I finally found myself elevated off the ground in a hammock the way the good Lord intended, for the first time since arriving in Mexico. Things were looking up.

The Abejas run Acteal kind of like a Zapatista caracol; there were a couple shops there (including Lupita’s own corner store), but only a couple people living there semi-permanently. It is mostly used for gatherings, events and (during the time we were there) as a place of refuge. It’s run by a group called the mesa directiva who are elected and vaguely analogous to the junta de buen gobierno, but with longer terms and more authority. But the Abejas are still primarily an indigenous organisation fighting (peacefully) for their rights, land and autonomy; they aren’t Zapatistas, but they’re cut from the same cloth.

Whilst we were there, a new armed group appeared in Pantelhó (up the road) and may or may not have taken over the town hall. They demanded that the Army come in and kick out the self-professed autodefensa group El Machete, who they accused of being a criminal group and responsible for several disappearances, or they’d do it themselves. Only the Mexican and local news covered the events, as far as I can tell. The government were saying everything was under control, and from what we could gather there were a lot of cops and soldiers in Pantelhó and the roads leading up to it.

In terms of Mexican DEFCON levels this seemed to be somewhere above an ¡ay-ay-ay! but below a ¡Dios mío!; in the British system that’s somewhere between a kerfuffle and an oh dear oh dear. Other than receiving occasional updates on that conflict up the road, our time passed uneventfully.

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The big church in the centre of the hamlet was built after the 1997 massacre. At the back of the village was another small church building, which we didn’t see used for anything except storage during the time we were there. Whilst the building itself was new, it was built on the site of the former church where many of the women tried to hide during the massacre; most were killed. The floor of that church is untiled, revealing the bare earth on which the original church stood.

A detailed account of the massacre itself is available here. Even given that it’s a massacre, it’s still probably more harrowing than you expect. However, the reality is not shied away from by the community, even 25 years on; from another article:

Every year, the people of Acteal relive the horror of what happened that day, recalling the events in vivid detail. Some perform re-enactments. Villagers see the ritual retelling of their story as essential, not only as a way to pay respect to the martyrs who helped bring global visibility to the guerrilla war in Chiapas, but also as a reminder to those who remain in power that the horrors that took place here will not be erased from history.

There has thusfar been no official effort to hold those ultimately responsible for the massacre to account. The murderers themselves, though initially arrested and given long sentences, were progressively released early back into the surrounding communities. Though the new AMLO government has finally acknowledged the government’s role—from forming and supporting the paramilitaries in the first place to nearby Army forces not responding despite being able to hear the gunfire to then trying to quietly dispose of the bodies—their response was to try and buy the silence of the victims and survivors (and that linked article also includes several quotes from Simón Pedro, later assassinated). Some Abejas took the financial settlement; don’t forget, these guys are by almost all measurements dirt-poor. But the majority have refused anything less than justice being done, and I really hope that one day they get it.

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…It Was the Best of Times ¶

So ended the least exciting two weeks of this whole trip.

Me and my compa had both been ill most of the brigade. I started ill, got a bit better around the midpoint and then either relapsed or got a fresh new cold (or, more likely, COVID-19, as there was an outbreak back at the house in San Cris a couple days after we’d left). We’d also been blowing our way through our toilet paper supplies as tissues and ran out the day before we left. So, when the mesa directiva invited us to a parting coffee on the morning of our departure (before a two-hour-long and very windy drive) I was a bit nervous, but then it turned out there was no coffee: only a nice, non-caffeinated lemon tisane.

The journey was uneventful, and the mountain ranges appeared very strange and alien as we rose out of the valley because I’d decided to listen to Huun-Huur-Tu in the taxi. We gave the outgoing group a quick debrief and then I headed off to my hotel, which turned out to be a much shorter walk than I’d expected.

I was in room #46, but that turned out to only be on the second floor. The shower looked unimpressive until I turned it on and realised it was probably the best I’d had in months. I’d had almost exactly as many pesos as I needed to pay for my hotel room, so I went out to the cash machine and found it with no queue, and it worked first time. I went to Las Carmelitas for their desayano del día, and it turned out to be exactly what I didn’t know I needed after two weeks of mostly rice: enfrijoladas montadas con carne. I also had a carrot cake, because why not.

Later, back in my room, I went to wash my hands and realised there was no soap. I was thinking I’d have to traipse down to the reception to ask for some, when I realised there was some provided on my side table. Then, as I went through my bags, I found another bar hidden away that would do me as a backup for the remainder of my time in Mexico.

I turned on my laptop and realised I hadn’t taken a photo of the Wi-Fi login back at the reception. But then (and by this time I was starting to predict ways things could work out for me) it turned out I can view saved Wi-Fi passwords on my phone. I noticed that the hotel offered a laundry service and it turned out to be pretty cheap, and they said they’d have the clothes ready by the morning.

For dinner I looked up a pizza place someone at Fandango had recommended to me, buy it was a bit far. But, there was another pizza place about half the distance away called La Minerva. I went and got a huge pizza to go, and on my way home realised I had no hot sauce. However, as I had by this point kind of assumed, there was a tub of the stuff included in with the pizza, and it was one of the best hot sauces I’ve ever tasted. Plus, when I got back, the hotel reception told me they’d done my clothes already.

So now I found myself with three nights in a nice swish hotel (read: the cheapest place in San Cris that offered private rooms and bathrooms). We had a final brigade debrief the following afternoon, but we’d already wrote up our report as we went along so it didn’t take long. Otherwise, I downloaded a bunch of games and barely left my room for anything that wasn’t edible.

Sometimes you have a period of time where everything is just peachy. I had several days of one. I was happy to be back in San Cris and I was excited to be wrapping things up soon. With the exception of the church across the road from my hostel deciding that 6am was an ideal time to launch fireworks each morning, my final days in San Cris passed pleasantly. I’d been unsure about whether or not to go to the beach for the end of my time in Mexico, as the weather forecast didn’t look particularly promising:

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Prediction: all of the symbols, simultaneously.

However, the weather forecast for San Cris looked about the same, yet I’d seen uninterrupted sunshine since I got back. I decided to throw caution to the wind and book a redeye coach to Oaxaca: storms or no storms, I was off to the beach!

Oaxaca ¶

The bus ran overnight, but I lucked out with two seats to myself for most of it. I did get into a shoving match at one point with one woman who insisted on reclining her seat all the way back whilst I was reaching forward to get something, even after I tapped her on the top of the head and asked her to hold on a moment, but otherwise the ride was uneventful.

My hostel wasn’t far from the bus terminal, so I walked over at 7am. One guy stopped me to ask where I was from (I guess recognising me as a tourist wasn’t too hard, laden as I was with bags), and then followed up by immediately asking whether I had WhatsApp. He said he had moved to Huatulco several years ago (I assume from the US, based on his accent) and likes to help people out. Maybe he was trying to flog me tourist tours, maybe this was a drug solicitation effort uncharacteristically early in the day, or maybe he just genuinely did want to give me tips for the place; either way, I hadn’t had enough sleep to parse what was going on (and had decided to stop in the middle of crossing the road) and it felt a little odd, so I said I’d give him my number if I saw him again and walked on. I never did.

The reports of Huatulco’s raininess had been overstated, but the weather was nonetheless not ideal for beach tripping: it was Honduras-level hot, but humid and not particularly sunny. After a couple days of sweating myself inside-out in an otherwise-empty hostel, where all of the nearby eateries seemed expensive, I decided to book a flight to Mexico City for the latter half of the week. Shortly after doing so, I discovered a bunch of cheap comedores nearby and was joined by a few others in my dorm. One of these was a girl from Veracruz who I told about my goal of visiting a beach in the morning before my flight; she was keen to join, so we made a rough plan.

Come the morning, the sun was out in force like I hadn’t seen all week. We took a taxi to the trailhead and walked for forty-five minutes through forest as the bugs took their several pounds of flesh. Finally, we arrived at Playa Cacaluta: the filming location of one of my favourite films, and an absolutely perfect Pacific beach. We lay in the sun for several hours, listening to the crashing of the (very powerful) waves.

Photo by the author

After getting back to La Crucecita and having lunch, it was off to the airport.

Mexico Shitty ¶

I have very little to say about Mexico City, except that it was shit. In a region full of charmless major cities, Mexico City was the bleakest. In that spirit, the place I stayed—Hostal Ciudad de Mexico—was easily the worst place I stayed all trip, and the only time I felt compelled to leave a review. To top it all off, a launderette stole all of my socks.

The highlight of my not-short-enough stay in the City was getting up at 4am on the Sunday to go to the airport and leave it, thus ending the most divisive part of my trip: the highs were the highest but the lows were the lowest.

Cuba is a compelling, confounding and wildly contradictory place. Depending on who you are or who you talk to, you may hear that it’s an authoritarian hellhole, a tropical socialist idyll, both or just about anything in-between. I’ve been alluding to eventually visiting Cuba since the very beginning my trip, and I’ve finally made good on that: I was eager to see the reality for myself, to try and separate propaganda from reality and to hopefully learn a thing or two about that messy interface where ideals meet reality.

It turns out I had a lot to say, but if I were to attempt a pithy one-line summary, for an Anglocentric audience at least, I’d say this: imagine if Britain fended off the Luftwaffe at the Battle of Britain and waited a few years, but then the invasion of France just… never happened, and instead the country lived under the Blitz for six decades and counting. If that’s satisfied your curiosity then congratulations, you can have your afternoon back. Otherwise, read on.

This post will be a little different to the others in this series. For one, it will be Long with a capital Jesus, Ben, sometimes less is more; at just over 30,000 words (excluding appendices) it is more than half the length of a Ph.D.  thesis, and there are around 500 links, so don’t overlook the table of contents off to the side (or above, if you’re on a mobile device). There are several reasons for this length: The Brigade itself was two densely-packed weeks of fascinating and often challenging educational explorations, political discussions that would run into the wee hours of the early morning and at least one dancefloor punch-up. As such, there’s a lot to get through, and that’s before I even get to my extra week in Havana or lingering questions that I’ve been grappling with ever since leaving, or new ones that have been raised as I’ve continued to research the topic. On those latter points, expect this post to contain more mini-essays and digressions than usual, and for many paragraphs to end with question marks, rather than full stops.

Secondly, whereas I usually don’t directly attribute quotes in these reports and leave out most people’s names, I don’t generally follow any hard or fast rules for this. However, given the politically sensitive nature of this trip and the increasing levels of political repression back in the UK, I will be applying the Chatham House Rule much more strictly in this piece, except for public figures and those Cubans named in the CSC’s own report.¹ Also, I’m writing this up from my notes over a month later, so any direct quotations should be considered potentially paraphrasal, not least because most of the speakers were talking in Spanish.

Background ¶

I went out of my way to find a way of visiting Cuba that would be political, rather than just laying on sunny beaches and knocking back Havana Club. But why, and from what angle, was I so keen to visit?

Why Cuba? ¶

Akala first piqued my interest in Cuba. I was reading his Natives against the backdrop of the 2020 George Floyd protests and, in a chapter entitled Why Do White People Love Mandela? Why Do Conservatives Hate Castro?, he related the following:

The first foreign country Mandela visited upon release from prison was Cuba, where he met and shared a podium with Fidel Castro, a man he referred to as my brother and my president.

This came in the personal context of my own politicisation, which I plan to write more about elsewhere but which we could perhaps say had started in earnest two years earlier and was turbocharged during the pandemic. I was questioning a lot of my prior conceptions of the world and actively seeking out information that would challenge these. However, I don’t think I had ever really thought much about Cuba before this. I had a vague image of Castro with his beard and military fatigues and that he was some sort of dictator, and something something communism, but nothing beyond that. But now I was intrigued.

Time passed, until I found myself gearing up to head to Latin America for the better part of a year. I hadn’t thought much more about Cuba since 2020, but now that I would be heading to its neck of the woods I decided it was time to swot up. I started with Manufacturing the Enemy: The Media War Against Cuba. From the introduction onwards, the book was eye-opening. For example, this quote:

One of the most consistent anti-revolutionary propaganda is the attempt to demonstrate how far advanced Cuba was economically and socially before Fidel Castro took over and supposedly ruined everything. The media and anti-Cuba experts point to areas such as education and health care to try to substantiate the country’s failures under the revolution.

What is missed is comparative data. The benefits of the country’s social programs were in the vast majority enjoyed by those living in Havana and Cuba’s other urban areas. In the countryside, they were virtually non-existent before the revolution. Fidel Castro’s movement was aimed at changing that dynamic, to try and provide those in the rural regions with similar community assistances. To erase the urban centric attitude of a government official who stated: Havana is Cuba, the rest is landscape.

Bolender then cites a comparison of pre-Revolution Havana with the rest of the country, which I think is well worth quoting here in full:

Sixty per cent of physicians, 62 per cent of dentists, and 80 per cent of all hospital beds were located in Havana in 1956–57. There was only one hospital in rural Cuba. Four out of five workers in the countryside received medical attention only if they paid for it; as a result most had no access to health care. Infant mortality averaged 60 per 1,000 but that figure was reduced by more than half in Havana. In 1958 there were approximately 6,000 doctors in Cuba for a population of seven million. An estimated 50 per cent left in the first year after the revolution following the new government’s order that doctors had to be redistributed throughout the country. To replace the loss Cuba built three new training schools by 1962. By 2006 there were 70,000 doctors for a population of 11 million, almost all with one or two specialities. In 2010 infant mortality had fallen to six per 1,000, on par with American statistics. Life expectancy in 1959 was 59 years; in 2006 it was 75. In all of Cuba, the number of hospitals has risen from 57 before the revolution to 170 today, plus 250 polyclinics (health centers), previously unknown; beds available in hospitals and clinics have doubled, from 21,000 to 42,000, from 3.3 per 1,000 inhabitants to 5.4.

Bolender adds that:

Before the revolution, 23.6 percent of the Cuban population was illiterate. In rural areas, over half the population could not read or write and 61 percent of the children did not go to school. To address this problem, Castro asked young students in the cities to travel to the countryside and teach the people to read and write. Known as the Literacy Campaign, the 12-month program started in early 1960 and involved hundreds of thousands of students. By its end, Cuba had a literacy rate of 99 percent of the population.

The whole book was like this, countering the freakishly consistent media line from the US press; regardless of an individual outlet’s supposed political leaning, they march in lockstep on this issue.² He traced the use of the same tropes regarding Cuba all the way back to the time of the Spanish–American War, a time when the US was more open about its imperial ambitions. I also learnt that Cuba hadn’t originally declared itself Marxist–Leninist, and only moved into the Soviet sphere of influence after being frozen out of any alternative by the US:

Soviet-style socialism was never a political aim in Cuba: it was seen as a means of saving the revolution, whose first goal was national independence. Under those conditions, the struggle goes on, with or without socialism.

In addition, whilst the US continues to claim that the Cuban government never reimbursed the owners of land and property that was seized after the Revolution, this was not for lack of trying on the Cubans’ part:

When it became apparent that the American side had no intention of negotiation, the revolutionary government accelerated nationalizing property (regardless of what foreign entity owned it) with little regard to reparations. However, by the 1980s, compensation for nationalized properties belonging to all non-US countries had been settled.

There were all manner of startling quotes, some of the most astounding coming straight from the mouths of US politicians. For example, a 1960 memo.  from some State Department ghoul on the original motives behind the blockade, namely denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government. And also this from President Kennedy himself:

I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.

Around the same time I also read Chomsky’s Rogue States (which includes the evocatively-titled essay Cuba and the U.S. Government: David vs. Goliath), binged the podcast series Blowback and watched an explainer of how their electoral system works. I now knew that something really interesting was going on in the Caribbean, and I needed to get myself to Cuba. But how? And, more importantly, how could I get there in a more political capacity?

I initially tried contacting the University of Havana, who I’d heard offer month-long Spanish courses, but my emails bounced. Whilst looking for options, I discovered the UK-based Cuba Solidarity Campaign (CSC). As luck would have it, they run a May Day Brigade to Cuba every year for young trade unionists. As young in the UK trade union movement can mean up to 35 years old that wasn’t a problem, but I’ve been union-less³ since I quit my last job back in mid-2022. But, after some discussions (and getting a UK-based friend to phone their office because my emails weren’t getting through) I was on board, and at a highly reduced rate since I didn’t need the flights from or back to the UK.

Ben, the Anarcho-Trotskyist CIA Agent ¶

So, I had established my interest in Cuba, and I had found my in, but from what perspective would I be coming? For the precise definitions I am using for the various bits of political terminology, see the relevant appendix.

I am intentionally woolly about my own politics. A politics pal of mine once called me a horrible floating voter, though years later he had settled on defining me as some kind of anarchist. I’ve always found precise political labelling to be an exercise as unedifying as it is distracting, and at its worst it can become dangerously prescriptive. I don’t think a healthy mind selects an ideology and then queries it when making decisions, people just follow their beliefs and intuitions (or what they think will benefit them) and eventually the resultant behaviour forms patterns that can reveal their underlying motivations (perhaps even to themselves). I just say and do what feels right, try to constantly question myself and present my working wherever possible; I will leave the ideological classification problem up to my future biographers.

But I do understand that that can be unsatisfying. For one, any Marxists in the audience will be uncomfortable with not knowing which box to put me in so that they can then denounce me for being in that box. And everyone knows one can’t be taken seriously in the political arena without regurgitating a load of books at people first, so here are my theoretical bona fides: I’d not call myself a Marxist, or an anyone-ist for that matter,⁴ but I appreciate some of Marx’s method and disagree with other parts. I think the base and superstructure concept and the theory of alienation are solid; I think the more teleological or predictive parts are clearly not borne out by history since he was writing. I’ve not directly read the scriptures beyond the Communist Manifesto (though Capital and Eighteenth Brumaire are on my to-read list), but I’m familiar with a lot of their contents through secondary sources. I studied Rosa Luxumberg and the Spartacists way back at school along with Russian history from Tsar Nicholas I to the death of Stalin,⁵ and I went out of my way to visit the memorial to Kurt Eisner whilst passing through Munich last summer. I’ve read some bits and bobs of Lenin, and occasionally he manages to stop being a histrionic weirdo long enough to produce something valuable like Imperialism. Other writers I’ve read who tend to appear under the Marxist label include Franz Fanon, Fredy Perlman, Mark Fisher, de Beauvoir and Sartre, plus related post-colonial authors like Paul Gilroy and Achille Mbembe, though I’m sure there are many more that I’m neglecting, or that I don’t think of as Marxists.

I personally think communism sounds pretty neat, even as I doubt that it is achievable on a large scale, but I’d be perfectly happy with a system in which people are able to pursue it locally if they want to and aren’t hurting anyone inside or outside of their communities. I’m against authoritarian socialism in principle and I think that Marxism–Leninism specifically—don’t you see, the beatings are for your own good!—is an idea so absurd that only an intellectual could believe [it]. Of all of its variants the ones that tend to end up doing the least harm (e.g., Titoism) seem to get called Trotskyist, so I guess that’s my preferred strain, but don’t mistake this for support of Trotsky; he deserved every inch of that icepick for his work in Kronstadt. There is a certain idealistic tragedy to Trotskyism, though. Marxism–Leninism is a fundamentally bad idea that goes horribly wrong pretty much every time it gets attempted, and Stalinism and Trotskyism represent the two possible responses to this that don’t require one to re-examine the underlying philosophy: simply deny that things are going wrong or that all the death and destruction is great, actually; or say that this example doesn’t count because of whatever reason, but the next time will surely be different. Or, put visually:

Image by the author, top cartoon by K.C. Green, bottom images by the BBC

I do plan to try and properly articulate my own politics (and, perhaps more interestingly, how they have developed over time) in a future million-word, twenty-appendix blog post. For now, suffice it to say that back in 2014 I eighteen years old, listening to Pat the Bunny, reading Emma Goldman and calling my views something akin to anarcho-communism. Between 2014–16 I was reading more CrimethInc. and exploring post-left anarchism, before deciding that fishing food out of dumpsters forever didn’t appeal. In 2018 I tried to describe what I now know is an organicist position, arguing in favour of confederalism as the only system of association that could reflect this.⁶ Around the same time a combination of me leaving university to become a real human being, a couple of relationships, reading the exquisite Letters of Insurgents and, most importantly, encountering the Kurdish Freedom Movement led me to a new appreciation of my own politics, and over intervening years I’ve further explored both that movement and related ones (e.g., the Zapatistas of southern Mexico) and sought out more practical activities.

Philosophically I’m an absurdist, and I take a lot of moral cues from Camus’ postwar humanism. Ethically I’m generally deontological in my approach.⁷ Politically I suppose I’m currently best described as a democratic confederalist or communalist, and one could broadly lump me in under the banner of libertarian socialism, but most important to me is that I identify myself as being firmly within the without adjectives camp; the anti-authoritarian streak has always been present in my thinking, even when my understanding of how best to achieve this have changed. That all said, I’m not so doctrinaire that I can’t recognise that some states are preferable to others.

As a result of all of the above, though, I rather stood out amidst the rest of the Brigade. Most of the Marxist–Leninists correctly identified me as an anarchist (but made it sound like a slur) and a couple decided I was a Trotskyist; I think that’s tankie for dick. Thanks to my US citizenship and weird Nicaraguan origin story,⁸ the one thing that everyone could agree on was that I was clearly working for the CIA.⁹ But, whilst I am not certainly not ideologically aligned with the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) and I think the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat is as bad as any other,¹⁰ I am always happy to talk with anyone, no matter how much we disagree; I believe in separating a person and their ideology, and I can point to a lot of instances where maintaining connections and friendships across seemingly-irreconcible differences of opinion has proven beneficial in the long run. I’m also unrelentingly catholic when it comes to my choice of sources, and perpetually curious; I enjoy the thought of finding out that I’ve been wrong about something and the thrill of new information far outweighs any embarrassment I might have felt at having been wrong to begin with (or, perhaps, having lacked nuance).

So, consider this piece as one of reportage and rumination, not propaganda, from a source openly sympathetic to the goals of the Cuban political project, but also primed to be sceptical of the Cuban government (as with all governments) and cautious not to be made a useful idiot.¹¹ Wherever possible I have tried to find sources to back up the claims that I heard made, as well as counter-evidence or potential caveats that I think are worth noting; the absence of a link does not necessarily mean the claim is incorrect, but only that I was unable to independently verify it.

The Brigade ¶

After a 16-hour bus ride to San José, a night spent sleeping in Juan Santamaría International (or trying to sleep, to be more accurate), two flights and another 5 hours in José Martí International—the most boring airport terminal in the world—waiting for the rest of the brigade to arrive, here we all were, ready for two jam-packed weeks of revolutionary politics and cuba libres.

Photo by the author

Our delegation of 50-ish trade unionists (plus me!) hailed from all across the UK & Ireland, representing industries ranging from transportation to healthcare and included a mix of union staff, workplace reps ¹² and rank-and-file members. On the political front I think everyone was some kind of (state) socialist, maybe some of them were also communists, and there were perhaps 10–15 avowed Marxist–Leninists of some stripe or other, including around 8 card-carrying Communist Party of Britain members.¹³ There was definitely a sizeable contingent of not-particularly-radical brigadistas who were mainly there for a Caribbean holiday, and more power to ’em. All of the brigadistas, even those with whom I had major political difference, were fine company, and after months of barely seeing a Brit this experience has confirmed my belief that we are objectively the funniest people in the world.

The XVI Brigada Internacional Primero de May in total brought together over 300 delegates from 29 different countries, representing every single continent bar Antarctica. The Yanks had the largest presence in total, split into a few delegations, but we were the second-biggest group. Whilst this was the sixteenth May Day-specific brigade, international solidarity brigades have been coming to Cuba every year since the ’60s.

Photo by the author

We kicked off the Brigade at the Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), part of Cuba’s impressive domestic biopharmaceutical industry, with a floral tribute to Jose Martí and a few rounds of ¡viva!s—these would become a recurring theme, and eventually a running joke. After filing into a lecture theatre under the watchful gaze of a slideshow of Fidel Castro photos and words like revolutionary, humanist and absolute ledge, we heard from CIGB Director Dr Marta Ayala and Fernando González Llort, President of ICAP and one of the Cuban Five. There was a comment in memoriam for a recently-deceased South African activist, which prompted a (communist) rendition of My Mother Was a Kitchen Girl. We were told about the fuel shortage currently wracking the country,¹⁴ due to which we had had to abandon our initial itinerary and the Julio Antonio Mella International Camp in favour of staying in hotels within Havana; we were also told that due to this, the traditional large May Day celebrations in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, which usually saw millions of Cubans bused in from around the country, had been reduced to a number of smaller, localised celebrations.¹⁵ The meeting ended with a recital from a young, though very impressive, violinist from a local school.

Lectures ¶

Our time in Cuba began with three consecutive afternoons of lectures, each following a morning of collective agricultural work. I will deal with the former here, and the latter later on.

The Economic Situation in the Country and the Impact of the US Blockade (Gladys Hernández) ¶

First up was Gladys Hernández, Researcher at the Havana-based World Economy Research Centre (CIEM), talking to us about the current economic situation in Cuba and the continuing impact of the now 61-year-old illegal US blockade of the country.

Hernández acknowledged that Cuba was currently facing, perhaps, the biggest crisis of [its] history. This came in the context of an international economic crisis (or, as she called it, multicrisis) caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine (which supplies 80% of the world’s grain), and of course the COVID-19 pandemic. What made Cuba’s situation different to other countries’, though, was that most countries aren’t under a blockade, which had been intensified by Trump with 243 new measures in the midst of the pandemic. As a result, inflation in Cuba hit 70% in 2021, though it was now down to the mid-40s;¹⁶ the economy shrank by 10.9% in 2020, and growth dropped below 2% in 2022, compounded by Cuba’s worst-ever fire at a vital oil storage facility in Matanzas and the devastation caused by Hurricane Ian making landfall. As a result, the government had had to reintroduce measures not seen since the Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Cuba also has its eyes trained on threats further over the horizon, such as preparing for the impacts of climate change.

There was some positive news, however. President Biden repealed a handful of his predecessor’s new measures (though most remain in force). Cuba had seen the lowest COVID-19 infection rate and case fatality rate in all of Latin America (0.37% compared to 1–1.54% in the rest of the world). Cuba had seen only 8,530 deaths from the disease, and has achieved a 98% vaccination rate compared to 94% in the developed world and only 6% in the developing world, which includes children in the world’s first such programme.¹⁷ The pandemic had been bad, she acknowledged, but Cuba now had a lot of international prestige from its domestically-produced vaccines and low infection and death rates.

And whilst they had not yet hit their target of 2m tourists for the year (down from a pre-pandemic annual number ~4.7m), 1.7m had thus far come to the island. To support this, and a 18% annual growth rate in tourism, hotels had been built at a breakneck pace: there were now 300, compared to only 57 in the ’80s, though I’m unsure if she was talking about the whole country or just Havana. We want tourists to come back, Hernández said, and told us that the bulk of the previous year’s visitors had been from Russia; obviously, this proved to be a basket best not filled with all of one’s eggs.¹⁸ Cuba had recently signed an memorandum of understanding with China aiming to strengthen tourism co-operation between the two countries.

She then took on the claim that Cuba’s economy is dependent on remittances sent home from Cubans abroad, highlighting that these bring in a little over $2bn per year and claiming that they were important, but not vital, in the face of a total GDP of $107bn (though they are apparently the country’s third largest source of foreign currency, after medical internationalism and tourism, which helps to explain the damage done when Trump-era sanctions resulted in the closure of Western Union branches across the island; these were amongst the handful of new restrictions that Biden has since repealed).

Hernández expressed her frustration at the US’ reinstating (in the final few days of Trump’s presidency) of Cuba on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, this country that has done so much for the world. She also criticised those who claim that the government does nothing for Cubans, highlighting the 1.5% unemployment rate,¹⁹ recently raised minimum wage²⁰ and representative nature of government (more on this later); I like our popular government, she said, saying that it was composed of ordinary Cuban men and women. This was all particularly frustrating, she added, because the US and Cuba have much to discuss, highlighting issues of illegal immigration, drug trafficking and the threats posed to the Caribbean by climate change.

Hernández then explained the changing makeup of the Cuban economy, particularly the growing non-state sector, pointing out that micro-, small- or medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) represented 29% of employers within the country in 2022; the remaining 70% were state enterprises.²¹ This is certainly impressive, given that they have only been permitted since 2021,²² but she did not mention the domination of the military in an estimated 40–60% of the foreign exchange sectors of the economy. There is a law currently under discussion that would raise state wages, which would allow state employers to be more competitive with the higher-paying private enterprises. She recognised that communist countries in Asia (e.g., Vietnam, China) had been successful in adopting measures to encourage their state agencies to become world leaders, and that this was an example that Cuba was keen to follow.

She also addressed the 2021 protests that had shaken the country. Thousands had taken to the streets with a cry of DPEPPDPE, but Hernández claimed that there were only a handful of actors operating in bad faith, whilst the majority were just confused and understandably angry about the ongoing energy and food crises.²³ She said that, in response to the unrest, the government had instigated transformation programmes in around 2,000 of the most-deprived barrios in the country, including 66 in Havana alone, to address the accumulated needs of the people. We don’t want you to think that Cuba has no problems, she stated, but we will face them.

She closed by telling us that this was perhaps the most important brigade, and that we must be [Cuba’s] messengers. Cuba doesn’t publish everything about the good that is going on in the country,²⁴ she said, adding (somewhat menacingly, to my ears) that there is a need to educate [Cuban] media to better promote the achievements of the government. She then said that the global balance of power is currently shifting drastically: 60% of international financial transactions now take place in US dollars, down from 78% 10 years ago;²⁵ the introduction of the euro in 2002 had provided a valuable alternate foreign currency; and Russia’s exclusion from the SWIFT network would likely startle many others into accelerating efforts to build an alternative (though she thought that China could probably never be removed in the same way). In this context, Cuba had recently rescheduled its debt payments to the Paris Club and Russia, having gone into debt²⁶ to fund development processes (which she said is not the same [as going] into debt as a fascist dictatorship, though I’m unsure what exactly she was referring to; I can’t find anything to suggest that fascist dictatorships are particularly prone to debt forgiveness). Hernández stressed that we were never forced to accept terms we don’t agree with, unlike with the World Bank,²⁷ and we believe debts must be repaid.

The Legislative System in Cuba and the Latest Laws Adopted (José Luis Toledo Santander) ¶

Our second lecture was on the topic of the Cuban legislative system: how it works; its composition; and its recent activities. It was delivered by Dr José Luis Toledo Santander, ANPP deputy for the Plaza de la Revolución municipality since 2018 and chairman of its Commission for Constitutional and Legal Affairs, whilst Gerardo Hernández Nordelo (another member of the Cuban Five, and also a deputy) moderated.

Toledo Santander began by highlighting the intense lawmaking activities currently underway within the Assembly, saying that 35 laws had been passed in the previous session alone.²⁸

In April 2019 they had adopted a revised constitution, following a three-month nationwide consultation and referendum. 135,000 meetings were held, and Cuban exiles were invited to participate. Three printings of the draft constitution sold out, and one author describe[d] Cuban citizens attending assemblies with annotated copies of the draft, demonstrating their level of engagement. Toledo Santander said that the vote saw a total of 7.85m votes cast out of a total voting population of 8.7m,²⁹ for a turnout of 90.15%, and that the 90.61% that voted in favour therefore represented 78.3% of the total voting population.³⁰ The new constitution reaffirmed that the Communist Party of Cuba … is the superior driving force of the society and the State which organizes and orients the communal forces towards the construction of socialism and its progress toward a communist society. It also reaffirmed that that country is governed by a socialist economic system based on ownership by all people of the fundamental means of production as the primary form of property as well as the planned direction of the economy; in Toledo Santander’s words, the Cuban economy recognises the market, but doesn’t let it go wild.

The new constitution defines seven types of property, and Toledo Santander highlighted the key ones as being private property, personal property and property owned in a joint venture with the state; he provided the example of a house, stating that this would be personal property (and pointing out that some 85% of Cubans are homeowners), but would become private property if it were rented out. He said that the MSMEs were a mixture of private enterprises and joint enterprises with the state.

He also highlighted that the new constitution guarantees human rights, as it declares that human dignity is the supreme value that underpins the recognition and exercise of the rights and duties enshrined in the Constitution, treaties, and laws and also that the Cuban State recognizes and guarantees to a person the non-renounceable, indivisible, and interdependent enjoyment and exercise of human rights, in correspondence with the principles of progressivity and nondiscrimination. However, words alone do not mean much—the North Korean constitution also claims that citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, assembly, demonstration and association, for example—and Toledo Santander specifically has been accused of approv[ing] laws that violate constitutional rights and of being a defender of the anti-constitutional theory that the magna carta cannot establish guidelines for the Communist Party.

He contrasted the political structure of the government now to how it had been under the previous 1976 constitution, which had introduced the election of delegates to the newly-constituted ANPP, which was the supreme authority of the state. These delegates received no salary, were non-professional and met for two sessions per year, plus any extraordinary sessions (of which there had been 4 in the past year, Toledo Santander said). The position of President of the Council of State was introduced and made the head of both the state and the government. Since the new constitution, the head of government is now the Prime Minister of the ANPP, and the head of state is now the newly-created post of President of the Republic, currently Miguel Díaz-Canel. This change came about, said Toledo Santander, because Cuba wanted a president with powers, but not presidentialism, and so it created a semi-parliamentary system in which the President recommends a candidate for Prime Minister, who is then appointed by the ANPP, and likewise for the members of the Council of State (the real day-to-day governing body in the country).

Cuba is divided into 168 municipalities, which are grouped into 15 provinces. Prior to 2019, local government was conducted by Provincial Assemblies, but it was found that they slowed down the system, so they were abolished in favour of new provincial governors and deputy governors, along with a provincial council to which they are accountable. In municipal elections, the people of the municipality recommend candidates (between 2–8 per ballot), who then need to win 50% of the vote (plus one) to win, and elections are re-run if that threshold is not met. The new constitution also introduced municipal mayors to replace the old system in which one person headed both the legislative Municipal Assembly and the executive Administrative Council, which left them overstretched. Governors and deputy governors are elected by Municipal Assembly delegates. Toledo Santander added that Cuba does not have a constitutional court, and so responsibility for ruling on constitutionality is left to the ANPP.

He then moved on to the recently updated Código Penal. Under the new code, he said, no-one can make a statement to the police without a lawyer, and the police must provide public defenders. He spoke of a long-standing desire to reduce pretrial detention times that had finally been realised though the granting of a right to go to court to challenge one’s detention; habeus corpus is now part of the constitutionally-guaranteed rights. Criminal hearings are public in Cuba as a holdover from the Spanish system, and this has been strengthened in the new Código Penal. In addition, the administrative silence has been recognised as an infringement on the rights of Cubans, and public bodies can now be censured for acts of omission as well as commission. New types of sentences had been added that included weekend sentences of community work, and there was a new mechanism for early releases.

He did not at any point address the hundreds still imprisoned following the 2021 protests, nor persistent allegations of forced disappearances³¹ and torture;³² Cuba ratified the UN Convention against Torture in 1995. His only addressing of the domestic authoritarianism practised by the Cuban government was to quote Aquinas, saying that if a castle is under siege, all dissent is treason.³³

Most relevant for me, and perhaps only me, was that the new Código Penal was preceded by Cuba’s first bespoke data protection law. Toledo Santander didn’t go into further detail here, but a cursory look online suggests a legal regime not too dissimilar to that of the GDPR, complete with a distinction between personal and sensitive data, defined bases for lawful processing, data subject rights, though there seem to be fewer of such rights and the exception to requiring consent to access someone’s data when done so for reasons of general welfare, public order, and national security is likely not subject to any of the (admittedly imperfect) scrutiny as in other jurisdictions; I have noticed that Cubadebate, which the BBC say has become something of a sounding-board of public opinion on the island in recent years, is not available over HTTPS.

Toledo Santander went on to complain about the media criticising the new Código Penal for not reducing the number of crimes that merit a death sentences. He said that the number had not increased and that the Cubans were enemies of the death penalty in principle,³⁴ stressing that there had been no executions carried out for a decade and that state policy is to maintain it only for exceptional circumstances; the 1997–8 hotel bombers had not been executed, he pointed out, and nor had a Miamian who assassinated a Municipal Assembly president.

He addressed a couple of other important laws, old and new, such as the recently-passed Food Sovereignty and Security Law and the post-9/11 Law against Acts of Terrorism; he didn’t elaborate further on either, but the latter does have a rather interesting introduction:

This Law is founded upon the deeply held ethical and political convictions that have always inspired the Cuban Revolution, and represents an expression of our determination to reject and condemn, by means of specific legal measures, the methods and practices of terrorism.

Moreover, the people have Cuba unquestionably possess the moral authority to do so because they have been victimized by such crimes for over forty years and because, despite the high costs of the deaths and injuries suffered by thousands of Cubans, as well as the tremendous moral prejudice and property losses inflicted on the country, Cuba has always dealt with these losses with legitimate resources and not through war which, by its very nature and outcome, is also a form of terrorism which Cuba strongly repudiates.

Lastly, he addressed the recently-passed update to the Código Familia, which he said does not impose any one model of the family, but rather tries to protect all family types; 66.85% voted in favour of the revisions, on a turnout of 74.12%. Much of the international coverage has focussed on the new Code’s legalisation of gay marriage through its redefinition of marriage from being between a man and a woman to being between two people, the reforms go far beyond that to encompass gender equality, the rights of gender, sexual and relationship minorities (GSRMs) and surrogacy; Toledo Santander said that the latter had been a particular struggle, as there were fears that legalising it would lead to people selling their babies, and so safeguards in the final version include the requirement that the people must be related to one another, a court must approve it and any doctor who conducts the process irregularly will be stripped of their medical license. The Código Familia has been hailed as being among the most progressive in Latin America. Vital in the success of the campaign was the support of Mariela Castro: Raúl Castro’s daughter; current director of the CENESEX; and the first (and, as far as I can tell, only) person in the history of the ANPP to vote against a piece of legislation.

Closing, Toledo Santander admitted that he do[es]n’t live in a perfect system and that we know people’s power is not a finished job, but we are the first so we are always learning. He also stressed that the Cubans are always happy to listen to what our friends tell us, and that they have learned that solidarity does not mean to beg, it means to share what you have.

The Media, the Disinformation War on Cuba and the Role of Social Networks in Defence of the Revolution (Michel Enrique Torres Corona) ¶

For the final lecture, we heard from Michel Enrique Torres Corona, Director of the Nuevo Milenio publishing house and host of Con Filo counter-propaganda television program.

Torres Corona stated that Cuba is subject to an information and media war, more so now than ever before following the boom in online media, as a result of which the war has acquired new features. Con Filo was created a few days after July 11, 2021, in light of the violent protests which he said were the result of the peak of the pandemic, combined with regular blackouts and a frustrated population. However, he alleged that there was also a large media drive against Cuba, such as the claimed hijacking of the popular pandemic hashtag #SOSCuba; this was an attempt, he said, to tr[y] to sell an image of a country in shambles, not a home, which got into people’s minds.

He said the Foreign Minister of Cuba had held a press conference regarding the hashtag, claiming that it represented algorithms and money; others have said that this is at best an exaggeration, and as with most Internet operations it will likely never be possible to confidently attribute responsibility. Torres Corona further minimised the protests, arguing that whilst books on regime change say you need to keep unrest going for at least a week, July 11 only lasted 24 hours. He claimed that the Revolution was never really in danger, but [July 11] was a before and after in our perception. They realised the threat of social media disinformation and that one can defame and attack anyone over digital networks with no consequence except maybe banning (emphasis mine, given the intense repression faced by independent journalists in the country). Before July 11, he said, there had been a difference between online toxicity and toxicity on the streets.

Cuban media, he said, realised the need for a space where people could compare the things that they are seeing, and Con Filo was the result. It has several social media accounts, though some have been blocked; I was able to find YouTube and Facebook profiles, but they appear to have been namesquatted on Twitter by someone retweeting anti-government messages, which is quite funny.

He said that Con Filo had three objectives:

1. to counter media campaigns against Cuba (i.e., mentioning that there is a fuel shortage but not mentioning the US blockade;
2. to promote digital literacy; and
3. to communicate information about the Revolution.

On the first point, Torres Corona cited an article he had read that claimed that Cuba was the poorest country in Latin America, which ignored Haiti.³⁵ He said that the media try to keep people in a state of constant rage, giving the hypothetical example of an angry guy who has a bad day at work, then gets home to find that there is a blackout; this guy is already in an optimal state of rage, and then he goes on his phone and sees disinformation that tries to keep him there. He confessed that the most difficult part of countering fake news is countering stories that contain elements of truth.³⁶ He is clearly aware of this in his own work; for example, this episode features footage of people challenging a US State Department spokesperson over Cuba’s presence on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, including this absolutely exquisite squirm:

Questioner

Based on your previous response, I was wondering if you are saying that any government that commits any rights abuses deserves to be on this list?

Spokesperson

…I'm not going to, uh, parse the specific parts of the participation on this list or not. Your question was about [proceeds to talk about something unrelated]

In the episode, Torres Corona then goes on to recount the lengthy and violent history of US-backed terrorism against Cuba. The US barely needs help to look bad, particularly in the context of Cuba, and this is a much more effective piece than just dismissing the July 11 protests out-of-hand as having been foreign agitation. The show is also chock-full of Internet memes.

On the second objective, he told us how Cuba has gone from a country with no Internet to one where people connect all the time in just five years, from little Internet to 4G. He singled out CiberCuba as a particularly active misinformation campaign that preyed on Cubans’ digital illiteracy, as they don’t now how to protect their data or avoid scams. The first step, he said, was to instil a discipline of suspicion, which would help to dull the impact of manipulated images and AI-generated audio and videos (the former of which they addressed in an episode entitled El rostro del fascismo); in the future … we must be suspicious of everything.

Regarding the third objective, Torres Corona talked about bringing in historians and suchlike who have influence, but only amongst academics and challeng[ing] the myth that everyone online is anti-Revolution, saying that we have made emerging groups visible. He also mentioned a pro-democracy group called Archipelago, led by playwright Yunior García, who had planned a series of marches in November 2021. Torres Corona proudly recounted how the Con Filo team had clashed with them, showing their links to external backing, and arguing that you can’t exercise a constitutional right against the Constitution. They had also challenged the idea that García is an honest activist, and had countered reports that he was missing in prison and being tortured by releasing footage of him alive and kicking in a Spanish airport a long way away and safe from what he kicked up. This is all a very unsavoury way of describing García being surrounded in his home and prevented from leaving it to join the marches, and then choosing to flee into exile rather than facing imprisonment; this is no doubt why there was some controversy around Torres Corona being invited to be a keynote speaker at an academic Cuba conference in the UK last year.

Torres Corona went on to talk about Con Filo’s work reporting on campaigns around new laws and political events happening in the country. He highlighted an episode of the show—Nos vamos para Miami—about a recent Cuban–American baseball game. He said that the episode showed people the faces of hatred and fascism, including people in US shirts insulting the Cuban players.

He said some some had criticised Con Filo for publicising counter-revolutionaries, but he claimed that even people who don’t agree with communism, when they see those people, those dark anticommunist figures in Miami, they turn against them. He stressed that we do not do research or do reports, we just try to counter the misinformation narrative. He said that any country can have weeks or days or unrest, citing the gilets jaunes in France, but the news stops referring to them quickly. July 11 is still being talked about. Only one person died,³⁷ there was no lethal force³⁸ or tear gas, yet we are presented as a repressive dictatorship.³⁹ He acknowledged that people are thinking beings with different opinions, not all opposed or all for, and we need dialogue, he said, though this was rather at odds with his treatment of Yunior García. He said that being objective is better in the long run, it will make us more persuasive, and said that we don’t want to just make propaganda.

In the Q&A, someone asked about election interference and its role in the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Torres Corona responded that we must not be against tech. , and the Bolsonaro won because of fear and xenophobia. Hitler had done the same thing, he added, long before social media. In response to another question from one of the Ghanaian delegates, he said that we have Cuban doctors in Ghana in places Ghanaian doctors wouldn’t want to go, and then paraphrased an African proverb that says until rabbits learn to write their own story, the tale of hunting will always glorify the hunter. In another question, about how one determines how many reporters to produce each year in a planned economy, Torres Corona stressed that he was a propagandist, not a journalist, though I’d be intrigued to know what he thought the different was in Cuba. He also commented on the high quality of Cuba’s journalistic education, saying that some people take that training and choose to work for the counter-revolution.⁴⁰

Concluding, Torres Corona thanked anti-government rap groups with US links; one member of one had been filmed asking for an invasion of Cuba which was great, we just played that all the time. He contrasted the contemporary Cuban exiles in Miami with José Martí and Fidel Castro, who were both exiled for a long time, but [who] spent it plotting their return. Cubans, he said, are educated on moral authority. The exiles are not courageous or willing to sacrifice, unlike Castro and the guerrillas; if they were courageous, they would be revolutionaries.

Tour of the Revolution ¶

We spent the rest of our time being bused to and fro around Havana (with a police motorcycle escort, no less) for numerous visits. This began with three mornings of agricultural work, the first two at the CCS “Arides Estévez Sánchez”.

Photo by the author

The urban farm—named after a revolutionary, Army officer and co-founder of the Communist Party of Cuba who was killed in the line of internationalist duty by an anti-tank mine fighting in the Angolan Civil War—is part of the internationally famous Cuban urban farming movement, of which Monthly Review has said:

Cuba’s achievements in urban agriculture are truly remarkable—there are 383,000 urban farms, covering 50,000 hectares of otherwise unused land and producing more than 1.5 million tons of vegetables with top urban farms reaching a yield of 20 kg/m per year of edible plant material using no synthetic chemicals—equivalent to a hundred tons per hectare. Urban farms supply 70 percent or more of all the fresh vegetables consumed in cities such as Havana and Villa Clara…

No other country in the world has achieved this level of success with a form of agriculture that uses the ecological services of biodiversity and reduces food miles, energy use, and effectively closes local production and consumption cycles.

We helped out with the work, planting corn, weeding plant beds and more. I ended up acting as translator between the president of the farm and several of the brigadistas, who wanted to know more about his life and work. When one asked him how many hours he worked, he said that he worked about 8 hours per day, 7 days per week and had done for 14 years.⁴¹ We asked if he enjoyed it—if he was a campesino feliz, in my translation—and he said yes; we asked if he ever took holidays, and he said he sometimes went home to spend time with his wife and children, though often they came to see him at the farm and stayed over. But he did say that he loved coming to the farm to hang out with the other members, who seemed to form the bulk of his social circle, and he had travelled a little to the Dominican Republic for work purposes.

Photo by the author

For the third day, we visited the much larger UEB Latin America, which takes products from other farms and processes them. We planted more things, cleared more fields and prepared herbs for use in pharmaceuticals and alternative medicines. We were told at the end that we had performed several months worth of work in only a few days, so it seems enough monkeys and enough typewriters really can do more good than harm.

One afternoon we visited Toitico Producciones, a social centre and after-school club that provided young people with music and dance lessons, English classes and more. The kids there put on a show for us which was certainly entertaining, but some Latino music should absolutely not be danced to (not to mention twerked to) by seven-year-olds.

We later visited the Psicopedagogical Center “La Castellana”, a center dedicated to caring for those with neurological, physical and social impairments. We watched another performance from the service users and then had a tour, seeing the products of their art therapy workshops (including big cardboard vaccines). Many of the brigadistas, particularly those working in education and care, marvelled at the low staff to user ratios, community integration and life-long care. We followed this up with a visit to the Center for Neurosciences of Cuba where they presented some of their recent research on Alzheimer’s in the warmest room in the world; as a non-neuroscientist and very sweaty boy, I can’t say I took a lot in.

Photo by the author

We also visited Industria Electrónica Empresa “Camilo Cienfuegos”, a factory that produces many domestic electronics products. Here we heard from the SNTI about how unions work in Cuba, providing social services as well as workplace representation to their members,⁴² as well as some of the difficulties faced by the business due to the blockade. The union head talked about how emulación socialista promoted competition between workers and improved productivity, though he didn’t tell us who the Cuban Stakhanov was. The director of the factory told us that they were the first industry in the country to be fully powered by renewable energy, and said that a hard year for the country has come to an end [but] perhaps others shall come. We were led around a showroom of products produced by the factory, where I took the opportunity to ask how many hours the workers here put in: 8 hours per day, Monday to Friday, which explains why the place was so empty on the Saturday we were there. I can’t help but feel the farmers are getting shafted on the work-life balance here.

In the Q&A session I asked the following, in Spanish because I was getting fed up with the recurrent language barrier issues:

I’m Ben from England, I’m a computer scientist and free software activist. It’s easier to download a file than to import something, so does Cuba make use of and promote the use of free software and open designs, for example chips using RISC-V architecture, 3D printers, etc.?

The key takeaway from the response was finding out that they use GNU/Linux in the factory; I later found out that they’ve even rolled their own distro.  called Nova, based on Ubuntu. That’s pretty cool.

That evening, we headed to the Casa de la Amistad for the much-awaited International Night! Everyone had been lugging around beers, jars of Branston pickle, Fray Bentos pie tins and more since leaving the UK, but we were finally able to lay them all out on the table for the delectation of the other delegations. I helped flog the wares for a while, mostly so I could keep an eye on the various ales that had been included; I made sure to help myself to some much-needed free samples. We were certainly one of the most popular stalls—the Yanks had only brought political literature, and had shown up too late to get a table—but our primary cultural contribution was probably getting the teenage-looking waitstaff very drunk on Jameson; I hope they did us proud by picking up a bag of cans at the local offie and drinking them in a park later on.

Photo by the author

The food and drink were but one part of the culture sharing: there was also a performing arts element. Most delegations went for songs and a couple for poems, whilst the Yanks performed some embarrassingly serious slam poetry about how they aren’t really American and we should stop calling them that. The MVP was probably the old Andalusian guy who stood up on his own and belted out a song. But, soon enough, our own time came. And then the skies opened. Undeterred and highly inebriated, the lot of us clambered up on stage and unfurled our flags as almost all of the audience fled under cover (though not the Communist Party of Ireland guys, who boldly sat in the rain cheering us on because they’re real Gs). Then, dripping wet, we proceeded to belt out (and occasionally forget the words to) Viva la Quinta Brigada and There is Power in a Union. We left the stage, paused for a rousing chant of Lizzie’s in a Box and proceeded to earn our reputation as the trashy delegation that has the most fun. I’ve never been so proud to be British.

Then, to cap off our time in Havana, we visited the Centro Fidel Castro Ruz, a museum and library dedicated to the famed revolutionary who led the country between 1959–2008. Hosted inside a gorgeous house (that had been requisitioned from the American socialite who originally owned it after she fled following the Revolution), the centre features all manner of Castro bits and bobs, from his favourite AK-47 to a pair of boots he once wore. I’ve always found museums dedicated to a single person a little weird, and this was no exception, but there were some really cool exhibits, such as one in which cylinders could be plucked from a map of the world and placed onto a table to reveal a breakdown of Castro’s interactions with that country.

However, whilst we were basking in Fidelismo a violent storm struck Havana, leaving parts of it heavily flooded; on our coach ride back we made waves driving through several of the larger puddles and saw someone wading down the road in water up to their waist. We were later told that the May Day celebrations scheduled for the following day had been cancelled as a result, and there was many a disheartened brigadista to be found in the hotel bar that night.

Photo by the author

We spent what would have been May Day wandering around Havana Viejo instead. A group of us headed over to the Plaza de la Revolución so that everyone could get some photos in front of Che’s big head, and I heard that someone from another delegation had taken a taxi there early in the morning just to make sure that the parade wasn’t still going ahead and we were just being kept away; who says tankies are paranoid? We stopped at a few pleasant but unmemorable (though quite expensive) bars and visited the Feria de Publicaciones y Curiosidades, where I picked up a copy of Castro’s History Will Absolve Me and we lost another brigadista for several hours as he tried to haggle them to within an inch of their lives on various tchotchkes and knick-knacks.

In Your Own Time, Go On ¶

The organised trips were certainly interesting, but the real highlight of the trip was all of the unscripted interactions that took place during our downtime. It was during these that we were able to talk to ordinary Cubans, members of other delegations and one another. I think it is important here to mention that we had complete freedom of movement during the whole brigade, with no hard requirement to attend any of the programmed visits and no register-taking. In the evenings we were completely left to our own devices, as well a couple of afternoons that had been put aside for us to wander Havana Viejo and Trinidad. Brigadistas routinely headed into Havana, had candid discussions with normal Cubans and saw some more of the realities of life in the country first-hand. In this I am glad that I did not come straight to Cuba from the UK and have instead spent 7-odd months in Central America recalibrating my sense of comfort, because I heard remarks from some brigadistas who I think interpreted some of the things they saw as signs of uniquely Cuban poverty, whereas I’ve come to regard them as common to the whole region; having to put toilet paper in the bin, for example, or ramshackle houses made of bare cinder blocks with corrogated sheet metal roofs.

All of this is for me perhaps the single most compelling piece of evidence to counter the common narrative of Cuba as just another authoritarian state. The organisers clearly had enough trust in both us and the Cuban people to leave us to explore freely and, from a practical standpoint, the ability to go off-script at any time means that it was not possible to have stage-managed our experience; Potemkin villages are no use when the people you’re trying to impress can walk right up to them. We even got to experience the famous healthcare system as an on-call doctor stayed in the hotel with us for the duration of the Brigade, and later more acutely when one of our brigadistas injured her ankle and was whisked away to hospital for an X-ray and cast, at no cost and with minimal crowding in the waiting room; our brigade paramedic, who had accompanied her, was suitably impressed.

The Internet was also interesting to experience. There are a handful of US media outlets and independent blogs that are banned by the Cuban government, but Internet censorship is by no means as pervasive as in places like China. The only issue I heard about of a brigadista being unable to access something (unsurprisingly, we don’t generally read Cuban dissident blogs or US media outlets) was when they tried to submit some university coursework and were unable to access the portal for doing so; this seems to have been a result of US sanctions, though. Cubans used common social media sites freely, and we even saw an ice cream parlour with a ring light setup for filming TikTok content. The US government seems to be a bigger threat to Internet access in Cuba than the Cuban one.

Also relevant is that there were no restrictions to us using VPNs when accessing the Internet, so whilst actually getting online could certainly be a pain in the arse those with the technical means were generally able to access everything they wanted, and my Internet traffic will be of little use to any Cuban spooks listening in. Unlike China, where VPNs are generally illegal and using one can get one in trouble, in Cuba they seem to be widely accepted (though, of course, treatment of us tourists and the normal Cubans may vary) and we even had speakers directly point to them as vital for bypassing US restrictions, for example when accessing scientific papers.

Lastly, whilst Cuba is statistically a very safe country, we did encounter a few issues. One pair of brigadistas ended up in a hairy situation when a Cuban who had been showing them around the city invited them into their home, before threatening them into buying something. Another time the pair tried bringing a friend they had made in town back to our hotel, but the security wouldn’t let him into the lobby: it’s not clear if this is because of a risk of crime or because they didn’t want us to fraternise too much, but all of the hotels in downtown Havana had doormen who I assume fulfil a similar function.

Prostitution is also semi-legal and very visible in the tourist areas, but the oddest thing were the jinteros: they’d strike up conversation by asking you where you were from, and then ask if you wanted to exchange money, or buy drugs, or procure prostitutes. A couple of the more persistent ones would walk alongside you for a bit or put a bit more effort into building rapport first, and the most dedicated guy I encountered completely changed directions and walked with me for about five blocks, also advising me on which restaurants to eat at, asking if I wanted to go for dinner with him and, when all that failed, switching tack and asking me to give him money to buy a pizza. It was all very surreal and, irritatingly, you couldn’t just filter out where you from?s because just as many random Cubans would also ask that out of curiosity and not follow it up with anything. I’ve been in Latin America for a while, in places as poor if not poorer than Cuba, and I’ve never seen anything like it.

Cubans on Cuba ¶

Many brigadistas reported Cubans complaining about the shortages, as expected, but also some interesting comments about how it’s impossible to succeed without being involved with the Party. One reported that they were unable to start a business if they wanted and that there was no scope for entrepreneurship within the country’s system; this would seem to run counter to the recent proliferation of MSMEs, but it may be that there are other hurdles to overcome, such as lack of access to the capital to start a new business in the first place.⁴³ One brigadista reported that someone had told them he was waiting for the first opportunity to leave the country. Other travellers I’ve met on my wider trip have related similar stories, with one having been told that the Castros are the most corrupt family in the island.⁴⁴

The government line would no doubt be that these are all CIA agents who just happen to be posing as taxi drivers and the like, or (more charitably) that they have been misled by online disinformation.⁴⁵ Both of these dismissals are, I think, silly and even self-defeating; there is a lot of evidence to suggest that open democracies have a major advantage in responding to crises, due in part to the speed with with issues can be identified, different solutions proposed and debated and implementation monitored. Perhaps more importantly, people need a pressure release valve and they need to vent. But whilst repression of dissent in Cuba is well-documented, the willingness of ordinary Cubans to share their thoughts with us does suggest that they individually feel fairly safe to do so, although we can’t discount that we as foreigners pose far less of a risk of reporting them to the authorities than their fellow countrymen. But perhaps general dissent and criticism is mostly tolerated, up until the point it starts to look like a movement.⁴⁶

Also, without wanting to invalidate the critical views expressed, I don’t think anyone expects the average Cuban to go on and on about the Revolution and the wonders of socialism to the same extent as the political and industrial big-wigs that we were hearing from in the organised part of the tour.⁴⁷ Most people are not ideologues, and most people don’t really care about politics in an abstract sense: they want food to eat, safe water to drink, healthcare for when they get sick or injured and the promise of a better life for their children. And here we have to acknowledge the famous David Foster Wallace line about fish in water:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, Morning, boys, how’s the water? And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, What the hell is water?

What I mean by this is that Cubans live, and in most cases have always lived, with a social safety net that most people in the world can only dream of. The hedonic treadmill is real, and it must be easy to lose sight of that in the context of one’s (very real, very legitimate) complaints. So amidst the other comments, there were also people who complained that the much-vaunted Cuban healthcare system was corrupt because, if you wanted to get seen quickly, you have to bring the doctor a sandwich. And whilst it may be difficult to start a new business, one does not have to worry about becoming destitute if it fails, as 20% do in their first year of trading in the UK.

This all makes it hard to disentangle their complaints about the specific system under which the country operates from the kind of complaints one would expect to find in any poor country (or, for that matter, any country at all). Out of 216 countries, Cuba is ranked 69^th in nominal GDP, 89^th in GDP (PPP) and 113^th in GDP per capita. But, as Helen Yaffe has pointed out:

Even factoring in its low HDI per capita, the Human Development Index (HDI) lists Cuba in the high human development category; it excels not just in health and education, but also in women’s participation and political inclusion. Cuba has eliminated child malnutrition. No children sleep on the streets. In fact, there is no homelessness. Even during the hungry years of economic crisis of the 1990s, Cubans did not starve. Cuba stuck with the planned economy and it enabled them to ration their scarce resources.

I want to conclude this section with two further complications. First, I don’t want to suggest that everyone we spoke to was wholly negative. I struck up a conversation with a guy in a hole-in-the-wall food joint who said he loved living in Havana, largely due to the party scene, as well the bookseller working at the Feria de Publicaciones y Curiosidades (though he was trying to flog Soviet tat to gringos, so he may have been incentivised to big up the socialist paradise angle). However, I do think that the majority of Cubans we spoke to (if I include both people I talked to and conversations related by other brigadistas) were critical. Second, we spent most of our time in Havana and, per that quote I mentioned earlier, the difference between the city and the country can be stark in Cuba. It’s possible that those Cubans living in the capital were better-off than those in more rural areas, but at the same time it is also possible that those campesin@s would be more grateful to improvements brought to them by the Revolution, particularly if they or anyone they know experienced life under the Batista regime.

Viva la Drinking Brigada ¶

The conversations within the Brigade, and within our own delegation, also provided some fascinating insights into the ongoing issues back home (remember, I’ve been away for the best part of a year, leaving as just about everyone seemed to be going on strike but before the Tories banned effective protest), the differences and similarities between different struggles around the world and some absolutely rogue political takes.

I had a lot of time to pick the brain of one particular (and perfectly affable) raging tankie, but from other conversations I think the conclusions I’m about to draw apply more broadly than just him. I do think that we are broadly trying to do a similar thing—expressing scepticism and seeking out information contrary to mainstream media narratives—but as far as I can tell, he (and others) seem to have drawn the correct conclusion that our own media and government collude and propagandise, but then chosen to respond with complete credulousness towards propaganda from other (in most cases far nastier) regimes. I’m sure he would reply that I’m a counter-revolutionary for not accepting the claims of benevolent workers’ dictatorships at face value, or that the pursuit of objective truth is a bourgeois delusion, and that I am foolish for not treating mainstream media accounts (or, for that matter, reports from Western human rights organisations)⁴⁸ as a priori invalid. But I would say that however much one opposes NATO/US imperialism/etc., the enemy of one’s enemy is not necessarily one’s friend; one can easily have two enemies at the same time.

With many on the Brigade, and certainly my tankie pal, there was also a marked tendency towards whataboutery.⁴⁹ A good example of this was an early conversation where someone asked what I thought about China, which I ended along the lines of genocide is bad. My interlocutor did agree in principle, and then there was a pause, after which he added that the US supporting Islamist terrorists in Xinjiang is also bad. Did the US do that? I don’t know, but it certainly sounds like something they’d do. Is that also a shitty thing to do? Yes. Does that being a shitty thing have any bearing on the shittiness of China’s ongoing abuse of the Uyghurs? No, and neither does the presence of Islamist terrorism whether US-supported or otherwise. The whole idea of crimes against humanity is that they can never be justified by circumstance. Perhaps this is a consequence of the materialist conception of the world, where the role of human agency is diminished in the face of powerful forces of history beyond our control, but whilst it can sometimes be appropriate to establish the reasons that have influenced some decision, the causal responsibility and the moral responsibility for a decision itself are two very distinct things. The tankies certainly aren’t so quick to provide exculpatory context for the dreadful treatment of Muslims by the US, UK or Israel.

As a consequence of my travels I became known immediately as Ben from Nicaragua, at least when people weren’t just calling me Trot or spycop. Quite a few people wanted to know what Nicaragua had been like, and I can’t shake the sense that I left a trail of disappointed communists when I described it as an oppressive dictatorship and told them that that Revolution had been betrayed. Then again, for avid readers of sites like the Grayzone, which for the last couple years has been full of pro-Ortega propaganda, it must have been quite the shock. I think they got over it, though, either by dismissing me as a trustworthy source or by arguing, as one did, that the Sandinistas had never be really leftist to begin with: they were apparently always just social democrats.

We shared our hotel with most of the other European, African and Asian delegations. I’ve been told that our hotel had been under refurbishment when the accommodation plans changed last-minute, and staff were still ferrying in furniture several days into our arrival. Eventually the pool opened up, and we were just down the road from a cluster of beachfront bars. The hotel also put on regular evening entertainment, with the Madreagua dance troupe sharing the Santería religion and other elements of Afro-Cuban culture with us. A video of me dancing with an African love goddess exists somewhere out there, but unfortunately the person who took it never shared it with me.⁵⁰

Of course, there were some interpersonal dramas within the contingent. Most were the inevitable result of throwing 50-odd mostly-strangers together for a fortnight of drinking, but a couple were more political in nature, and thus are of interest to his essay. For the most part the tankies were dismissed as just being a bit odd by the rest of the delegation, but they had a particular beef with one brigadista in particular that I believe pre-dates the trip. The interesting part is that I heard one of them describe this brigadista as having no politics. However, I was also told that that the allegedly apolitical brigadista had successfully unionised their own workforce, and (dare I say it) there may be more productive ways of being political than reading endless theory and casually dropping terms like petite-bourgeois into conversation.

There was also a small Korean delegation sharing our hotel, made up of a bunch of South Koreans dressed in Jeon Tae-il t-shirts and one Spanish guy who was studying at Pyongyang University and dressed in head-to-toe North Korea gear every day. They were approaching things very seriously, inviting other delegations for sit-down talks in the hotel lobby to discuss one another’s political situations and strategies; notes were taken. I somehow ended up as one of our representatives, and it was an interesting chat. They said that professing communism has been illegal in South Korea since 1948 and, whilst the others were indignant about this, I can’t help but feel that if Cuba gets the besieged city allowance then the same must surely apply to someone with North Korea as a neighbour. All of them, South and (honorary) North, were pro-reunification, but their geopolitical analysis was intriguing: they praised former president Moon Jae-in for pursuing peaceful reunification, and felt that the US had scuppered the efforts out of a desire to maintain a vassal state in Asia. They asked us if we thought China was imperialist, and one of our group used a thousand words to say no, at which point they simply replied we do; one Austrian guy who had decided to sit in on the conversation was so shocked that he literally jumped out of his chair and ran around to better hear. The Koreans stated that they felt China was blocking the peace process for the exact same reasons, out of a desire to maintain North Korea as its vassal. China doesn’t want unification, they said, they want North Korea for themselves. The Koreans, as they considered themselves, are pawns.

But perhaps the most interesting conversations were with one of our contingent who I think is the wrongest human being I have ever had the pleasure to talk to, and whose wrongness is archetypical of several issues I’ve noticed across the Left, and certainly amidst this brigade. However, he was uncommonly direct in articulating his wild ideas, and oddly forthcoming about them, which made him the perfect avenue for exploring his (and, by extension, others who are less willing to admit it’s) worldview. But I’ll do that in an appendix.

International Solidarity Conference ¶

At the end of our time in Havana, we attended the International Meeting of Solidarity with Cuba at the Palacio de Convenciones.

Opening ¶

The conference opened with a panel, moderated by President Miguel Díaz-Canel and featuring various Cuban politicos and several international guests, including our own CSC Director Rob Miller.

Ulises Guilarte, General Secretary of the CTC, gave the introductory speech, talking about how the May Day celebrations had been rescheduled to May 5. Díaz-Canel then spoke briefly, saying that the main cause of our problems is resisting, after which Anayansi Camejo, Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, took the stage. She started by quoting Fidel Castro to say that international solidarity with Cuba is on the rise, and that Cuba had a responsibility not just to its own people, but to others who look to it as an example as well.⁵¹

She then lamented the impacts of the US sanctions, asking how much more could be done by our doctors without this blockade? She complained that Cuban businesses were deprived of access to US markets and criticised the listing of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, saying Cuba does not sponsor terrorism, it is a victim of it. She pointed out that the US let the airline bomber live a quiet life in Florida, and she stressed that Cuba does not sponsor terrorism, it sponsors peace; it does not sell arms or do assassinations. She quoted Castro again, from the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion, saying what the imperialists cannot forgive is that we are here. She stressed that we want to be equal neighbours with the US.

She then highlighted Cuba’s hosting of the third round of ceasefire talks between the Colombian government and the FARC, and listed several other struggles in which Cuba had intervened: Palestinian liberation; Sahrawi nationalism; the Bolivarian Alliance; US reparations for slavery; and Puerto Rican independence, with her describing Cuba and Puerto Rico as two wings of the same bird. She stressed that Cuba has a firm commitment to the UN Charter, to international law and multilateralism, but would always resist efforts to make everyone follow US rules. The weapons of the Cuban Revolution, she said, will continue to be humanitarianism, solidarity and two other things I didn’t catch. She closed by again quoting Castro: the world has been in solidarity with Cuba … Cuba has experienced what solidarity is about.⁵²

We then broke up into one of five workshops each:

• Anti-imperialist unity against the Monroe Doctrine;
• Young workers;
• Women for Peace;
• Challenges of the Working Class Around the World; and
• What Can International Solidarity Movements Do to Help End the Blockade?

Discussing US foreign policy didn’t seem particularly relevant to me, and I reasoned that the challenges of the working class around the world would be far removed from the challenges for it in the UK (or, for that matter, my own white-collar world of IT), so I went to the final workshop, which appealed because of its practical focus.

Workshop: What Can International Solidarity Movements Do to Help End the Blockade? ¶

Gerardo Hernández Nordelo again moderated, along with the Vice President of ICAP Victor Gaute López. The workshop took the form of a series of 3-minute interventions, mostly scheduled in advance.

First up, the Ambassador for the Sahrawi Republic spoke about how they are the only Spanish-speaking country in the Arab world, as a legacy of colonialism. He pointed out that it was the 50^th anniversary of the founding of the Polisario Front this year, and said that the blockade was better than white phosphorous and bombs being launched against Cuba.

He was followed by a Palestinian activist, who thanked Cuba for providing him a scholarship to study medicine there. He mentioned Khader Adnan, who had died earlier that morning in an Israeli prison after an 88-day hunger strike. He again thanked Cuba for t[eaching] us that the Palestinian cause is one of the most just causes in the world, and for Cuban support … always be[ing] unconditional. He closed by highlighting that this year marked the 75^th anniversary of the Nakba, that there were over 250 martyrs whose bodies Israel had not returned to their families and that 157 Palestinians have been killed this year alone, most between 20–25 years old.

Another speaker thanked Cuba for its support for the Colombian peace process. One of the organisers of the Canadian Che Guevara Volunteer Work Brigade, which has been coming to Cuba for three decades, pointed out that the Canucks were standing side-by-side with the US delegation. He quoted Che, saying that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth. An Ethiopian delegate announced that expressing solidarity to Cuba is, to me, a duty. The heads of two of the American delegations delivered a joint statement.

Unfortunately, almost all of the interventions were completely unrelated to the topic of the workshop. Barely anyone had any suggestions for how to work against the blockade; just a lot of warm words. The two speakers who did have something worthwhile to say were one delegate who said that if each of us can convince a couple people to come to Cuba as tourists, to spend money here, we are doing our part to break down the blockade, and then our own Rob Miller who talked about a current CSC campaign, but I’m not clear if this is public yet so I’ll remain schtum. During his intervention, he mentioned that following the passage of the Helms–Burton Act, the EU, the UK and others passed legislation designed to protect their people from any sanctions.

The final speaker was Chris Smalls, founder and president of the Amazon Labour Union, who the Yanks had brought with them on the Brigade. Whilst what he’s achieved is certainly very impressive, and he’s probably one of the most interesting and effective labour organisers currenly active, getting called one of the most influential people of 2022 and the future of labor by Time seems to have gone to his head: he mostly spent the conference drifting around taking photos with giddy Americans and being filmed doing so by his entourage of cameramen; he gave a clearly unprepared speech about why we should all work to unionise Amazon that stood out as rambling even amidst a workshop rife with it;⁵³ and he was dressed like an absolute pillock.

Plenary ¶

We regrouped in the main hall for a closing speech from Díaz-Canel. Unfortunately, all of the seats with live translation headphones were taken by Spanish-speakers who weren’t using them, so after a while I left. From the bits I could pick up, and everything I’d heard over the past week, I was pretty sure I could piece together a pretty accurate idea of what the speech involved: blockade this; viva la revolución that; Castro quotes peppered throughout.

Photo by the author

Some time later, Granma published a translated transcript of the speech.⁵⁴ And yeah, I was pretty much bang on. He started by talking about how in Cuba it’s the workers who are in power, affirmed everyone present’s support for human solidarity … and the causes pursued by the peoples for their true emancipation and quoted the Internationale. He talked about the Monroe Doctrine, he complained about the blockade and he stressed that three processes of participative democracy [the Código Familia referendum, plus municipal assembly and ANPP elections] staged just in the last six months, show the people’s trust in the Revolution, the boundless effort to ensure social justice at its core, and in the leadership of the revolutionary process (emphasis mine, as he didn’t mention that abstention in elections that used to see near 100% turnout has reached record highs).

Later, he addressed criticisms of Cuba’s commitment to socialism:

In difficult times, a lot of people ask: Why socialism in Cuba? Not everyone is prepared to live with an economic straightjacket, which has been opportunistically tightened more than once. This situation is so damaging to Cuban society and families that there are those who say we should give up on socialism.

Why did the Cuban Revolution choose the socialist path to prosperity? Because it’s the only alternative to capitalism; because it’s the best way to give power and the decisions about the country and the future, to the people.

I would have liked to have seen him justify his commitment to specifically authoritarian state socialism, but alas. He then addressed the history of the Cuban Revolution, acknowledging but also challenging its position within the Soviet bloc:

When the socialist community collapsed, and with it COMECON, and the Cuban economy shrank by over 30%, the Revolution grew politically and morally, with Fidel at the helm of a party of unity aware of its strength. The country needed five years to stop the decline and return to some degree of growth. But we grew! That is true socialism.

The alleged Caribbean soviet satellite survived more than the economic and political demise of the European soviet bloc; it survived the ideological disintegration and moral collapse of political parties and organizations it regarded as a role model. We were never a satellite!

He made the very valid point that it is incredible that our ability to develop is constrained by two laws of another country, referring to the Torricelli Act and the Helms–Burton Act, before building to a rhetorically excellent crescendo:

Abandoning socialism after those lessons of history is not an option, because we didn’t choose it at random; we chose it responsibly as an expression of the most advanced universal thinking on social justice.

Socialism is so effective in serving that noble, humanist aim, that even hamstrung, besieged, persecuted by the most powerful empire in history, we could not be suppressed or subdued.

So certain is it that only socialism offers a future of social justice that we believe that to be the primary motive for the blockade; namely, to forestall the success of an anti-capitalist, socialist system situated just 90 miles from the empire!

He concluded his speech with a fun story about revolutionary optimism:

In history, Cuba has been through many situations like today’s, but perhaps the darkest was that experienced during several days by the survivors of the Granma’s landfall. 13 days after dispersing, following the baptism of fire at Alegría de Pío, Fidel met up again with his brother Raúl and four others, in the middle of the night in a out-of-the-way spot known as Cinco Palmas. They hugged each other. Fidel asked how many rifles they carried; Raúl replied: Five. With my two, seven said Fidel, Now we’ll win the war for sure! According to Raúl, at that point he thought his brother had lost his mind. Win the war, indeed!

But astute readers will notice that I have skipped over a big chunk of the speech and, unfortunately, in between those two snippets, Díaz-Canel couldn’t help but trip over his own dick:

We reaffirm our solidarity with Sandinista Nicaragua, its people and president Comandante Daniel Ortega Saavedra; … We favor continued development and strengthening of the close, friendly bonds with Syria, based on respect for self-determination, territorial integrity, rejection of terrorism and of the imposition of economic sanctions by foreign powers or international organizations.

And here the rhetoric of human solidarity and emancipation hit the brick wall of the company the Cuban government keeps: a right-wing dictator, shouted-out-to by name, draped in the tattered flag of a past revolution who now guns down his own youth, impoverishes his people for his own enrichment and denies women the basic human rights that the Cubans keep stressing are an indispensible part of true social justice; and the Syrian regime—which has been enthusiastically running its way through the crimes against humanity bingo card for decades now, which is responsible for torturing to death over 14,000 of its people over the past ten years alone and which is now routinely detaining, abusing and disappearing returning refugees—gets to enjoy close, friendly bonds because of its rejection of terrorism.

Cuba has also long been one of the North Korean regime’s staunchest allies.⁵⁵ Díaz-Canel has been on a jolly to that delightful spot already; I wonder why he neglected to shout them out in his speech?⁵⁶ Cuba, even in its current authoritarian form, deserves so much better than to share space with monstrous regimes like these, and it pains me to see it debase itself like this. Instead, let me close this section with an example of how a truly revolutionary statement of international solidarity can sound:

…we want to tell the people of Cuba, who have now been o­n their path of resistance for many years, that you are not alone, and we do not agree with the blockade they are imposing, and we are going to see how to send you something, even if it is maize, for your resistance. And we want to tell the North American people that we know that the bad governments which you have and which spread harm throughout the world is o­ne thing — and those North Americans who struggle in their country, and who are in solidarity with the struggles of other countries, are a very different thing. … And to the indigenous brothers and sisters of Ecuador and Bolivia, we say you are giving a good lesson in history to all of Latin America, because now you are indeed putting a halt to neoliberal globalization. … And to all the young people of Latin America, that what you are doing is good, and you give us great hope.

Spíritused Away ¶

For the final few days of the Brigade, we headed out of Havana and off to the province of Sancti Spíritus: home to one of the most important sites of the Revolution, some charming colonial towns and perfect beaches.

Che (Hey Hey) ¶

On the way we stopped off at the town of Santa Clara, which holds particular significance for the Cuban Revolution. It was here that the Revolution was won, and it is here that the remains of one of its great heroes were laid to rest.

Photo by the author

We started at the Che Guevara Mausoleum, a sprawling complex comprising a huge statue, a tiled plaza and a mausoleum. Here we took an all-brigade photo, but I’m unsure which of the 300-odd phones it was taken on.

Then we headed into the town to visit the Tren Blindando, which commemorates the Battle of Santa Clara: the decisive battle of the Cuban Revolution in which Guevara and his suicide squad managed to ambush a heavily-armoured train carrying thousands of soldiers of the Batista regime en route to reinforce their forces elsewhere. 340 guerrillas attacked a force of 3,900 and forced their surrender; within 12 hours of the victory, the dictator had fled Cuba and the Revolution was victorious.

We then returned to the Mausoleum, where we queued up to shuffle past the crypt in which Guevara’s remains, alongside those of several of his comrades, were interred following their repatriation from Bolivia in 1997; an eternal flame flickered off to the side. Then we went through the Che Museum, where another brigadista asked me what I thought of the man. My response could be summed as mixed, but I don’t think I articulated myself very well at the time, so here we go for another attempt:

Che was and is three very different things: a man; a myth; and a legend. As a man he was both remarkable and flawed, as all men are. Bimbling my own way through Latin America for the past year, I obviously feel some common cause with the idealistic young middle class boy of the Motorcycle Diaries, who seems an eminently likable guy with a poetic turn of phrase.⁵⁷ As a military tactician he was unusually skilled, as the Battle of Santa Clara (and many other battles besides) can attest. He was clearly brave, often very creative and seems to have behaved chivalrously in battle (at least as regards his treatment of the regular regime soldiers). He clearly deserves the adoration the Cubans lay at his feet; without him, they probably would not have their country. He did a lot of good work post-Revolution, such as the Literacy Brigades, and I respect him for realising that his true calling lay elsewhere after his disastrous attempt to be a banker:

His stint as head of the National Bank … has been summarized by his deputy, Ernesto Betancourt: [He] was ignorant of the most elementary economic principles.

Photo by the author

There are criticisms often made of him that lack legitimacy. Mainstream sources often claim that he was privately racist, or openly homophobic and participated in the persecution of homosexuals in Cuba. However, these claims seem to revolve around a mixture of invented quotations from far-right activists and genuine quotations from the Motorcycle Diaries that reflect his young sheltered rich kid upbringing more than anything, and which he repudiates in the book’s closing passage; his actions fighting against Apartheid, in the Congo and so on serve to challenge this alleged racism.⁵⁸ It’s also often claimed that he was overzealous in the post-Revolution executions of Batista-era officials, but many of these were war criminals by any measure and his personal bloodthirstiness (at least at this point in time) is disputed; to quote Che biographer John Lee Anderson:

During the nineties, when my biography first appeared, it didn’t seem especially noteworthy to readers that Che had served as the fledgling Cuban revolution’s supreme prosecutor, presiding over the summary convictions and executions by firing squad of more than three hundred war criminals of the ancient regime — murderers and torturers, mostly. Two decades on, however, this facet of Che provokes unease in young readers who seem surprised to discover that Che was a flesh-and-blood revolutionary, and that, ergo, he killed people.

However, that does not mean there are not legitimate criticisms to be made as well. For me, the biggest obstacle to hagiography is his growing fanaticism and detachment from reality, which was clearly incipient even in his early days, but which definitely metastasised over time:

Something happened to him [during his time in Cuba]. Yes, he had absorbed many of the unpleasant ideas of [Juan] Peron, but so had lots of people. Such individuals went on with their lives and were not destroyed by an ideology. Politics really wasn’t all that important to Che until he went to Guatemala. There he discovered an ideology which clicked with his underlying beliefs and prejudices, seemed to explain the world and give his life substance and meaning. Che was a fundamentally normal, decent human being who became a slave of a cruel secular religion. His belief system consumed him, forcing him to do things he would not normally do. He made himself hard and fanatical. As his father, Guevara-Lynch stated, Ernesto brutalized his sensibilities to become a revolutionary.

Just after the Cuban missile crisis—the closest humanity has ever come to nuclear annihilation—he declared that if the rockets had been under Cuban control they would have retaliated against any US aggression by shooting the Yankee boats out of the water and firing on US cities;⁵⁹ we can all be very grateful that he was nowhere near the big red button, and it shows the change from the younger man who had sent back a postcard from Japan that read in order to fight better for peace, one must look at Hiroshima. If anything, Guevara’s growing unhingedness gives me more respect for Castro for managing to reign him in quite effectively.

By the time he went to Bolivia to try and provoke revolution without any knowledge of the ground, and having made no effort to forge support amongst the people there, his former military genius had devolved into banditry and nincompoopery; the Bolivians turned him in to the military, and why wouldn’t they? He was an annoyance and a threat that they felt no common cause with, largely through his own decisions. In sum:

Che exemplified the tragedy of a generation: brave, self-sacrificing, passionate, a fighter, yet at the same time, committed to a Marxist–Leninist project that crippled socialism, and set back human emancipation with its contempt for freedom and objectively state-capitalist project.

But where the man Che ended, the legend Che carried on. The Bolivian Army, when they published the photo of his corpse accidentally laid out in a Christlike pose (and later removed his hands for identification, with predictable echoes of the stigmata), scored perhaps the greatest political own goal of the last century.⁶⁰ This, along with Korda’s famous photo, served to guarantee him a permanent place in the pantheon of worldwide revolutionary heroes. As is the case for all historical figures, the flow of time has served to smooth of his rougher edges and leave only a series of his greatest moments. In this way, he can serve as a positive example, and no doubt this legend has gone on to inspire many fine acts. Like all historical heroes, he has become a partially-fictionalised simulacra of himself, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

When I was in Nicaragua, I stayed in a building that also housed an office of the Organización de Revolucionarios Deshabilitados “Ernesto Che Guevara”. One of the Nicas I worked with talked of how Che was an inspiration to him, a warrior and a man who helped us gain our freedom. I didn’t understand this last part at the time as I couldn’t find any evidence that Che had ever been to Nicaragua, or involved in the Sandinista Revolution, but I eventually realised I was misinterpreting two parts of the statement: by we, he meant both the Nicaraguans specifically and the Latin Americans in general, due to Che’s important role in the solidification of a united, anti-imperialist Latino identity; and by helped, he didn’t mean by providing training or engaging in combat, but by the promulgation of his ideas in works like Guerrilla Warfare and giving the people the confidence that they could fight their oppressors, and that they could win. The great irony here is that if or when the next generation of Nicaraguans overthrow their current dictator, many of them will probably be wearing Che shirts as they do so. They won’t be being hypocritical or naive, just as most skaters probably don’t know many details about the life of Andre the Giant; Che’s face has just become a symbol of a vague group affiliation and opposition to illegitimate power, largely disconnected from the flesh-and-blood revolutionary to whom it once belonged.

Lastly, when I say the mythic Che, I mean the way in which the legend Che intersects with Latin American religiosity. This is very much my observation as an outsider looking in, but Christianity here is full of religious icons, be they in small roadside chapels and or in paintings inside every small business, asking for the saints’ protections and blessings. There’s everything from saints that bridge indigenous beliefs and Catholicism to saints who shag your wife whilst you’re away. Within this cultural milieu, I think the image of Che has become yet another holy figure, whose protection can be invoked and who will invariably watch out for the poor and the exploited; for example, in Mexico I saw small businesses with banners announcing their membership in an anti-protection-racket collective, and besides that text was a familiar face.

This legacy is a fitting monument to who Che was, at his best moments, and it would be callous to deny his importance to a people who deserve all the sense of security they can derive from it. It doesn’t really matter that I have my issues with Che the man; we’re barely even talking about the same person.

Sancti Spíritus ¶

We arrived in Sancti Spíritus several hours later, and were welcomed by provincial officials outside the Monumento a los Mártires in the centre of the city. Then we split off into our separate hotels; whilst we hadn’t seen much of the American delegation thusfar as they were in a different hotel to us, here we would be sharing with them.

The following day we visited UEB Genética “Dos Ríos”, where we heard about their collective cattle ranch.⁶¹ Then we headed to the Hospital Provincial “Camilo Cienfuegos”, part of the second tier of the three-tier Cuban healthcare system (which comprises per-town family doctors, per-city polyclinics/hospitals and per-region specialist institutions). We heard from the hospital’s director and the head of its union. They told us about the structure of the Cuban healthcare system, the facilities they had to work with and their contribution to Cuba’s famed medical brigades: the back of the lecture hall was filled with medical staff and he asked all those who had participated in an overseas mission to raise their hands, whereupon they received a standing ovation.

A slight dampener was placed on the situation by one of the Yanks, who kept loudly talking over people asking questions. One of our brigadistas politely asked her to be quiet, at which point she flipped out and kicked off, including grabbing them by the shoulders and attempting to force them to turn back around. Our brigadista (with maturity I doubt I’dve been able to muster in her shoes) moved to another seat rather than escalate the situation, but when her neighbour tried to tell the American to be quiet, she changed tack and started booting off about white people denying black people spaces. Try as he might, not even one of the black members of our own delegation could convince her to stop.

This, it should again be stressed, during a lecture in a hospital as part of a solidarity brigade we are all members of.

Next up we visited one of the neighbourhoods under transformation that we’d heard about in the first lecture, as part of the government’s response to the conditions that it asserts led to the 2021 protests. We saw another performance from the kids and visited the local clinic, where we heard about the Cuban mother-and-child medical programme that provides support for things like routine vaccinations. Then a bunch of the kids hitched a ride on our ancient schoolbus, and we treated them to a cultural exchange:

Later that night we attended a block party in another neighbourhood, put on by the CDRs there. We drank, we danced and had a jolly good time, although Rob did pick a bad time to give a speech (i.e., after we were all rather drunk). A couple blocks away, the Cubans were firing absolute zingers at the Americans.

Photo by the author

The International Incident ¶

We headed back to our hotel and continued the drinking. With one assault under our belts that day, relations between us and the Yanks were strained. Whilst some of our delegation have occasionally let themselves down with respect to the Americans (e.g., booing them when they asked questions in Q&As), the Cubans had been models of hospitality. I think it’s clear that they view the Americans as the most valuable people to get on-side (for obvious practical reasons), and so the Yanks had been getting the best hotels, best visits (e.g., the Latin American School of Medicine and a personal sit-down with the president) and effusive praise every time they asked a question. I think the whole dynamic was best captured when we arrived at the hotel and the Cubans unfurled various flags, including the stars and stripes: a nice welcoming gesture (and probably the only US flag then flying in the whole country), to which some of our group assumed the Yanks had put it up themselves and started talking about nicking it later that night. At least the Cubans seem to know their friends from their enemies, and they are always at great pains to stress that they have no issue with the American people, only the US government.

And so I was very heartened that it appeared we had put aside our differences for a trans-Atlantic dance-off that night. I was sat with my back to the dancefloor, but when I saw one of our brigadistas walk past with a face like thunder, I knew there was something worth watching going on behind me. Sure enough, the dancefloor had descended into chaos, with several people screaming and holding one another back as the lights went up and the music cut out. Things eventually calmed down and the Yanks skulked off to sit in the dark by the pool whilst crisis talks within our delegation continued for several hours.

Near as I can tell, the problems began when one of the Americans took it upon themselves to determine which songs we were or were not eligible to request from the DJ (apparently Kanye West is theirs). She then repeatedly trod on a crutch-bound brigadista’s plaster cast-wrapped foot and nearly started a mass brawl with the immortal line above. Someone (white) told her she was being an embarrassment, so for good measure she retorted that your whole race is an embarrassment. Whilst I spent a lot of this trip running defence for the Yanks amidst the more exuberant members of our brigade, this was the third bizarre incident in as many days, as well as the second time in 24 hours that they had physically assaulted one of our group. Nothing was done about it and, as some of our brigadistas rightly pointed out, brushing the hospital incident under the carpet had all but guaranteed this result.

From what I could gather, the US contingent in the hotel with us was made up of several groups who largely didn’t know one another before coming. There was a core of pretty normal young Cuba solidarity activists who were fine, a small group of older black guys and gals who’d been coming to Cuba for decades who were also sound (and had been sharing some excellent stories; I’d heard suggestion that they may have been former Panthers, which would seem to check out), plus a group from the Black Alliance for Peace in matching t-shirts who I didn’t speak to. On top of this coalition, though, was a small group of unknown affiliation who could perhaps be described as belligerent nutters, racial obsessives⁶² or—and apologies for the tricky political science terminology here—giant throbbing cocks. We heard from some of the normal guys that they had apparently been sidelined by these kooks within their own delegation, and some of our own (black) delegates felt that they were trying to transpose the incredibly fucked-up racial politics of the US onto everywhere else in the world without regard to how the realities differ; how quintessentially American. To top it all off, this explosive coalition was being held together by the pair of teenagers who were the contingent co-ordinators (although no shade to them, the one I spoke to was nice enough and it’s an impressive achievement on both their parts).

May Day, at Long Last ¶

There was no time to dwell the following morning: it was time for us to join the (belated) May Day festivities! Hundreds of people lined the streets and many more participated in the march itself: schools; unions; youth clubs; and more, to which we added our own varied delegations. This was actually my first-ever May Day parade; go hard or go home.

Ruaraidh

Ruaraidh

Cuba Solidarity Campaign

We followed the parade with an afternoon in the colonial city of Trinidad. It was incredibly quiet (I think we were there in the off-season), but even by the high standards of some of the other colonial cities I’ve visited on this trip it was beautiful. We embarked on a walking tour, but a group of us decided pretty quickly that we’d rather sit at a rooftop bar and take in the ambience of the city rather than learn about the origin of the rocks used to build it, so we gave them the slip.

Then we all headed to the gobsmackingly gorgeous Playa Ancón, where the sun was shining and the bars was all free. We all ended up in the water before long and a regular stream of brigadistas carrying armfuls of cuba libres, entire two-litre water bottles filled with beer, or sometimes both kept our thirsts well-quenched. For hours. I can count on one hand the times I’ve been that drunk, and I’m sure by the end of it we were largely swimming in a pool of spilt alcohol, but the aquatic conga lines were well worth it.

Photo by the author

As an odd sideshow, the crutch-basher from the night before made a point of coming up to two of our black delegates (but not, as far as I’m aware, the crutch-bashee) to not-really-apologise for the night before. I then watched her spill her drink all over another of our brigadistas, who had sitting on the steps beside her happily minding her own business. I have no idea if this was intentional or is this person just cannot help being the biggest weapon on the planet,⁶³ but I was pretty astounded by the whole scene.

We returned to the hotel and the drinking continued. Tentative trans-Atlantic dancing resumed again, but the lunatic fringe showed no signs of showing up and the night passed without incident, except that some wag decided to push me into the pool whilst I had my phone in my pocket: one stream of obscenities later I was in my room trying to assess and mitigate the damage to the best of my incredibly inebriated ability. Then I decided that the vibe was gone and the night was over for me.

The following day that same wag donated her own phone to the cause of Ben needs some way to access his boarding pass to leave the country (along with other practical issues that gradually piled up over the course of the morning).⁶⁴ We all headed back to Havana, stopping for lunch en route. Me and the other brigadista who would be staying in Cuba worked the room saying our goodbyes, and then the others set off towards the airport whilst we got ripped off for a taxi to the city.

Alone in Havana ¶

Connectivity in Cuba is difficult at the best of times, but I can hardly think of a worse place to have to rebuild one’s digital affairs. I’ve already had to go through this once on this trip, from the middle of the jungle no less, and this was infinitely more of a ballache. At least that first run had taught me some hard lessons about how I had my stuff arranged that helped to mitigate some of the damage the second time around.

ICAP sorted me out with a hotel room and I had a chance to say goodbye to some of the other delegations, who we hadn’t seen much of since leaving Havana several days earlier. Then they hooked me up with a casa particular to stay in, but it lacked Wi-Fi and the nearest hotel’s connection was incredibly flaky, so I had to move. I looked up other casas on Airbnb and tried to book with one, but I first had to set up an account. Then I had to go through several steps of validation, like sending a picture of my ID, all of which failed for different reasons; I don’t know which, if any, were blockade-related. All of this was taking place as I tried to squeeze their godawful bloated React monstrosity of a site through a slow, temperamental and time-limited Wi-Fi connection, on an unfamiliar phone loaded with stock Android and all the bullshit that that includes.

I eventually messaged a host directly rather than booking through the site and arranged to meet them somewhere. I then nearly made myself homeless by accident when I checked out of my current place and headed across the city, and then I couldn’t find the host and had no means of contacting them. After waiting for half an hour longer than agreed I headed to the nearest hotel, where they told me the Wi-Fi was only for guests and I would have to walk several blocks to the nearest ETECSA store. I must’ve looked every bit as stressed and harried as I felt, because one of the receptionists gave me a Wi-Fi card to use and I eventually managed to link up with my host. I sincerely hope that anyone who works at Airbnb catches a non-fatal but irritating disease that is easily treated if caught on time, but they are unable to book the appointment because their GP’s Web site asks them to provide loads of unnecessary details first; I am pleased that me not booking through the site means that the host got to keep all of the fees they usually take out.

I spent the next several days catching up on work with my lovely, reliable and unlimited casa Wi-Fi connection, and checking out pretty much every eatery within three blocks: shout-out to Los Nardos and its weird fake-indoor-street-façade aesthetic. I also managed to get my old phone to turn on long enough to extract all of my photos and notes before the touchscreen started to freak out; I’m leaving it off now until I’m back in the UK.

Me and the other brigadista met up a couple of times, visiting the famous Hotel Nacional where the service was terrible, but we had a very interesting political conversation, which included at least one mild epiphany regarding my own sense of internationalism and affinity for the Kurdish movement, but that’s a story for another time. Even as someone who’s been to a few colonial cities now, Havana really was something else, and bizarrely the city it reminded me most of was Rome; something to do with the grandiosity and age of its buildings, the sheer number of them covered in scaffolding or hollowed-out and the unexpected ways in which historical artefacts kept cropping up in repurposed form:

Photo by the author

Photo by the author

Photo by the author

Photo by the author

We met up again on my final day in the city to visit the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, which housed a bunch of very snazzy Bauhaus pieces, followed by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, which had an excellent collection of Cuban art from a variety of periods. The ’50s–’60s were definitely a dull period for Cuban art as everyone seemed to just copy Picasso, Pollock and the rest, but pre- and post-that there was plenty to enjoy,⁶⁵ and I thought some were surprisingly spicy for the political climate in Cuba; perhaps good Party members don’t tend to visit art galleries.

I’ve always been more of a museum guy than a gallery one, and said so: my compa retorted that museums were bad and imperialist, which I didn’t immediately grasp until I realised she was talking about colonial plunderhouses like the British Museum. When I think museum my first thought is the National Museum of Computing near Bletchley Park, which I can’t really see upsetting anyone. We both agreed, though, that portrait galleries were terrible.

Painting by Pedro Álvarez

Painting by José Toirac and Tanya Angulo

Painting by Marcelo Pogolotti

Painting by Gilberto de la Nuez

Painting by Marcelo Pogolotti

Painting by Rafael Zarza

Installation by Lázaro Saavedra González

Installation by Carlos Consuelo Castañeda Castellanos

Painting by Juan Moreira Bencomo

Painting by Marcelo Pagolotti

Painting by Carlos Enríquez

Installation by René Francisco Rodríguez and Eduardo Ponjuán González

Painting by Tomás Sánchez

Statues by Alberto Lescay Merencio

Painting by Flavio Garciandia de Oraá

Installation by Carlos Alberto Estévez Carasa

And, just like that, it was finally time for me to leave. I had a bit of a strange interaction at the entrance to the airport when a guy demanded to know my destination and to see my passport before he’d let me in; I can only imagine that he was on the lookout for Cubans trying to leave,⁶⁶ but I don’t really see what function he served that the check-in agent didn’t already (unless the danger was that the check-in agents worked for the airlines, not the government). Then, because I just never learn, I settled in for another long night of trying to sleep in an airport.

My flight was at 6am, and I still had a load of Cuban pesos to spend. The government have shut down the official exchange points, so it’s not possible to convert pesos back into foreign currency. Unfortunately, despite what the signs on their desks claimed, none of the shops in the terminal were actually 24-hours. I managed to buy a copy of the Motorcycle Diaries (in Spanish) from one woman just as she was closing up, but that still left me with a big wad of notes that would soon be worthless. I found a couple of open cafés that would only take foreign currency and a book shop that had a few books I would have bought, but it didn’t open until 6:30; the woman running the only open shop a few doors down refused to take my money to give to the book shopkeeper when they showed up, and I didn’t fancy serving myself and risking getting arrested on my way out of the country.

In the end I gave about $60 worth of pesos to the cleaning ladies as I was queueing to board the plane, or several times their monthly salaries; how’s that for wealth redistribution?

Conclusions ¶

Photo by the author

My time in Cuba was fascinating, both the organised and the unorganised activities and the discussions I had throughout the three weeks. That is, in part, why this has taken me over a month to write up and why it is so long: I had a lot of things to process, a lot of research to do and a lot to say about my experience. Whatever someone may think of my political perspective, I don’t think anyone could accuse me of being unfair in this report.

So what conclusions have I drawn from this experience? I’ll break each part into its own section below, and whilst each should stand alone they are also intended to build on one another.

Democracy with Constrained Characteristics ¶

Let me state at the outset that I am far from prescriptive when it comes to what is and isn’t democracy. I once derailed a good chunk of my Master’s dissertation learning enough Greek to define a tree traversal mechanism that could be used to argue for giving dogs the vote, for example. In the second chapter of that dissertation, I argued for:

…abandon[ing] common but not-particularly-informative terms such as democracy. Classical Athenian democracy, for example, allowed only male citizens over 30 years old to run for office, making it under this more precise taxonomy an oligo-geronto-androcracy, or rule of the few on the basis of their being sufficiently old and male. Even a modern democracy like the UK restricts certain citizens—e.g., those in prison or under 18 years old—from participating directly, and is thus something of a poly-eleuthero-gerontocracy—rule of most, on the basis of their being sufficiently old and free.

I was by no means convinced even then that the systems of representative practices in the likes of the UK and the US, with their periodic elections and delegation of responsibility, are the one and only means of guaranteeing democracy, concluding that …representative democracy is more accurately described as democratically-elected oligocracy. In the years since I wrote that I have become more and more convinced that the electoral systems of these liberal democracies are in fact a profoundly undemocratic and disempowering force, even without the addition of expressly anti-majoritarian features like first-past-the-post in the UK and the Electoral College in the US. In this I am very influenced by way in which the term democracy is used within the Kurdish Freedom Movement, which emphasises autonomy and mass participation at all levels as indispensable components of a truly democratic society and which often talks of creating democratic modernity as opposed to the current state of capitalist modernity.⁶⁷

All of this is to say that I am primed to appreciate the Cuban democratic project, at least as it exists in theory. The actual process of voting, as I’ve addressed already, seems to be sufficiently secret and non-compulsory (and the Pioneers who traditionally guard the ballot boxes are adorable), though nosy neighbours can be far more of a threat to one’s well-being in an authoritarian state like Cuba than elsewhere; we arrived too late to witness the elections in person, and I would have very much liked to have done so. Many structural aspects of the system seem designed to promote bottom-up representation; for example,⁶⁸ elected Municipal Delegates make up to 50 per cent of the National and Provincial Assemblies [which] ensures that local people are fully part of all governmental bodies and creates strong links between the National Assembly and communities throughout the island. Similarly, people cannot nominate themselves [as candidates for the municipal assemblies], and neither can the PCC nominate: it must be the residents in the ward who nominate the candidates. The deprofessionalisation of the legislature though the lack of a salary and part-time nature of the role is also, to my mind, desirable, as is the ban on campaigning.

However, this only applies at the municipal—i.e., lowest—level, and the Party controls the nomination process for the higher levels of the system to ensure that they maintain control over the actual direction of the state. The membership of the Candidacy Commissions are supposed to ensur[e] that the National Assembly reflects all sectors of Cuban society, including workers from the state and non-state sectors, members of the mass organisations, farmers, nationally known figures from the arts and sports, members of the armed forces, women, people of colour, all age-ranges, and from all parts of the island, but the Assembly only meets a couple times per year, and the Council of State is not quite so representative.

Fundamentally, though, choices within unreasonable constraints are not choices all, and so whether or not one thinks the Cubans have a real say in the composition and working of their government hinges on whether or not one thinks the constraints imposed are reasonable. Because the Communist Party of Cuba is the only party allowed to operate within the country, and despite it’s constitutional ban on being directly involved in elections, it has a hugely dominant role in the political system of the country despite it’s membership only being 700,000 (~6% of a population of around 11m). Despite representing a tiny fraction of the population, Reuters claim that all top level government and military officials are party members, as are most lower-level functionaries, and leaders of labor and other mass organizations, and even a more sympathetic source said in 2015 that 59.24% of those elected are members of the PCC, while 6.75% are members of the Union of Young Communists (UJC).⁶⁹

The only evidence I can find that there have ever been opposition candidates running in a Cuban election is these two guys in 2015 (which the previous source declined to mention, despite its seeming lack of historical precedent).⁷⁰ However, there are apparently other prospective opposition candidates who, it is alleged, are denied the chance to run for one reason or another. One article claims that vote share has no impact on the positions gained by elected officials, which does suggest that it is largely a rubber-stamping exercise; recall that the ANPP only meets for a few days every year, with day-to-day legislating being handled by the Council of State, and that Mariela Castro is seemingly the only person to have ever voted against a piece of legislation.

I’ve heard it argued that this all merely represents the formal codification of an often-unspoken reality within liberal democratic systems; that is, whilst we may have a proliferation of parties, they ultimately all represent the interests of the wealthy and the neoliberal world order.⁷¹ And certainly, we’ve seen in both the UK and US in recent years that when a socialist (even a moderate one) does try to run for high office, the powers-that-be are merciless in their fearmongering and character assassination. However, whilst the UK’s billionaire press did lose their collective goddamn minds over Corbyn, there was no risk of him being jailed for opposing the dominant ideology and no attempts to drive his car (or, I supposed, Chairman Mao-style bicycle) off the road. Similarly, there is no suggestion that the vote counts of the 2017 and 2019 general elections were illegitimate, meaning that even if the media coverage will have given many a distorted view, Corbynism failed to win over a sufficient number of voters for other reasons besides this (in the latter case, I imagine mostly Brexit). All this is to say that, whilst the deck is most certainly stacked within our own system, this just does not compare to Cuba where the deck is a load of copies of the same card and you risk jail for proposing a game of anything other than 52-Card Pickup.

So, Cubans’ only means of expressing dissent through their electoral system is through abstention, and the two possible forms of this seem to be massively on the rise: turnout in elections that took place shortly before we arrived was only 75%, down from a normal baseline of near 100% for the duration of Fidel’s reign; and the number of people voting selectively from the list of candidates provided has doubled from ~5–9% under Fidel to ~20%. I think the contrast in turnout between the 2019 constitutional referendum (~90%) and the 2023 parliamentary (~75%) and 2022 municipal (~69%) elections may be illustrative of this dissent;⁷² it would make sense that the former was viewed as a way to effect actual change, though within limitations, whilst the others are not (although the low municipal turnout would run counter my theory that there is at least low-level democratic engagement in Cuba). This is also why Torres Corona’s point about the relatively small scale of the July 11 protests is disingenuous; that they happened at all is remarkable (and, whilst I was in Havana following the Brigade, there was another protest in Guantánamo Province that led to the Internet being shut down for 24 hours).

The Cuban state’s (or, more accurately, every state’s) go-to response to accusations of repression is to point at external and internal threats, but what struck me was that no real attempt was made to outright deny that the repression existed throughout the trip; it was just ignored, not mentioned. Sometimes, it was indirectly implied to be necessary to defend the Revolution, and I am somewhat sympathetic to this argument: the Cuban Revolution (and the Party that considers itself its steward) has been facing an existential threat from the most powerful empire humanity has ever seen for sixty years. We’re not just talking times of war here, we’re talking times of absolutely cartoonish villainy: take, for example, Operation Peter Pan, where the CIA and the Catholic Church conspired to spread fear amongst Cuban parents that the government were about to nationalise their children. They then facilitated the exodus of over 14,000 unaccompanied minors (some as young as 6), many of whom suffered abuse and neglect in their new homes and perhaps as many as 10% of whom were never reunited with their parents. There have, historically, been no depths to which the US is unwilling to sink against Cuba, and in that light it makes a lot more sense why the government wants to keep a tight grip on the information reaching its citizens (amongst other, more normal state reasons like suppressing criticism and maintaining control).

Also, in the face of such pressures, it is unlikely that the UK or US would brook much criticism: this is not speculation, we have the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 from the First World War, the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939 from the Second and the Terrorism Act 2006 and the USA PATRIOT Act from the War on Terror, along with pandemic restrictions on speech, assembly, etc. When faced with a threat, be it military, economic, disease or otherwise, the state will encroach on people’s rights to guarantee its own security.

The other reason I am somewhat sympathetic to the Cuban government argument is that the UDHR lists 30 rights, of which the rights to freedom of expression (art.  19) and peaceful assembly (art.  20) are only two: where these are fairly well-established in the UK and US (current Tory/Republican attempts to restrict them notwithstanding), we’re backtracking on guaranteeing others such as the right to asylum (art.  14). Some are potentially better achieved through alternate systems (e.g., the right to democracy [art.  21], which sounds like it could well be better served by the more participatory Cuban system that we have been shown than our own system of five-yearly elections of careerist PPE graduates and atrocious wankers) and on some, the Cubans are leaps and bounds ahead of us (e.g., the right to education [art.  26], taking into account their far more limited resources).

But there is certainly a viciousness to a lot of their rhetoric around dissidents,⁷³ as well as all of the well-document allegations of physical brutality and persistent harassment. Even beyond Díaz-Canel calling for people to fight the July 11 protests in the street, the constant talk about shadowy counter-revolutionaries who are all US-funded foreign agents really starts to wear. For one, it often makes very little sense: nobody starves themselves to death for a pay cheque from Uncle Sam. For two, it can serve to confuse cause and effect: yes, the US probably does recruit and train individuals for the purpose of destabilising the Cuban government, but likely far more common is that they find people who have organically decided they are against the system they live in for whatever reason, and support them because their interests are aligned. That doesn’t make those people paid shills, and it doesn’t inherently make their complaints illegitimate; the Cuban government’s repression may well put them in a position where they have no means to make a living beyond what the US offers them. It’s telling that so many of the new generation of dissidents, like Yoani Sánchez, are young; they weren’t there for the triumph of the Revolution or the almost apocalyptic ideological struggle of the Cold War, they just know the Cuba of today that they have been born into and think it could be improved in ways the current system does not allow.

To quote Amartya Sen, democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes.. Despite the risks, Cubans (and especially young Cubans) are increasingly speaking out. Those that do not speak out publicly are clearly making their dissatisfaction known through the limited electoral means available to them, as I’ve said. Given the inherent ambiguity of abstention figures and the like it’s hard to tell exactly what message they’re trying to send; are they annoyed with the PCC and its authoritarianism, or with the entire socialist project? So whilst I do think there is some form of genuine participative democracy happening in Cuba, at least at the lower levels, it is highly constrained and has little to no sway in the upper echelons of government. I do understand that there are practical reasons for this—Bolender writes in Voices from the Other Side that the Cuban side has determined unity to be a crucial weapon in combating terrorism, subsequently developing a low tolerance for anything that is seen to be jeopardizing strength of patria, and the paranoia of the PCC is certainly not without cause—but if they really believed their own rhetoric about the people standing behind them (the Party) through thick and thin, they would have nothing to fear from giving the people a means to contradict them, and to be clear on exactly why they were doing so. Or perhaps the voters would give the Party its first unquestionable mandate to continue on.

A Blockade for All Occasions ¶

One thing that kept coming up, in every single talk we heard or visit we made, was the blockade. Now, obviously, the blockade is hugely damaging. It is estimated to have cost the Cuban economy over $1tn over half a century.⁷⁴ It has certainly killed people. In the grand scheme of US crimes against humanity it is amongst the longest-running, least-successful and perhaps most pointlessly cruel. It clearly hasn’t worked and there is no reason to expect that the sixty-second year of the blockade is the one that’ll finally clinch it.

Of course, opposing the blockade was one of the key purposes of the Brigade, so it is unsurprising that it kept coming up, but it really did get blamed for everything. For example, whilst writing this piece an article came out in the Cuban state press claiming that the blockade was responsible for hindering 13,000 cataract surgeries; however, at no point does it explain how the blockade is responsible, just that they have that many people on their waiting list. It doesn’t even say whether those surgeries are actually held up, or if that’s an unusually high number to have on their waiting list.⁷⁵

But, and there is a but, shortages and privation were not unknown to every other Marxist–Leninist country in history, even without a blockade. My parents spent time in Czechoslovakia in 1990 and described the empty store shelves to me. The Soviet Union was repeatedly wracked by famines of its own making, as is North Korea today. Centrally planned economies centrally suck for a whole slew of reasons that have been debated over at great length, and I don’t even think reasonable communists and I disagree totally on this; consider their recent opening of a partial private economy, and Toledo Santander’s comment about recognising the market, but not letting it run loose. Market forces are a tool like any other, powerful if utilised correctly and dangerous if misapplied or fetishised.⁷⁶

So would Cuba still be facing the economic struggles it is facing today, absent the blockade? Is it facing the same problems that previous planned economies have done, albeit exacerbated by the blockade, or has its distinct form of socialism solved all of those and all that remains is the blockade? If anyone could do it, my money would be on the Cubans, but it is impossible, under the current circumstances, to separate the signal from the noise; the only way to find out is to change the experimental conditions, and see what happens to a post-blockade Cuba. That, pragmatically, is reason enough to oppose the blockade: either Cuba can then flourish to the extent they claim they could, or the government loses its biggest excuse for its failures and finds itself out on its arse before long. Either outcome would be fine.

Wheat from Chaff ¶

Talk to any pro-Cuba activist, and you will invariably hear several stats: the six-month literacy campaign in the ’60s practically eradicated illiteracy in the country; Cuba spends over twice the proportion of its GDP on education as the UK and US (the second-highest rate in the world, after the Marshall Islands); and Cuba has amongst the highest life expectancy and lowest infant mortality rates in the world. These are all true, and represent incredible achievements for the Cuban project, but to ascribe them specifically to the Marxist–Leninist aspect of the Cuban project seems to me to be misleading.

For example, India had a literacy rate of around a third of Cuba’s lower, rural rate in 1960 (~20% to Cuba’s ~60%; the Cuban city rate was ~89%), and whilst the rate certainly hasn’t improved anywhere near as quickly (now sitting at ~70%, 60 years later), that improvement represents almost 900m newly-literate Indians—90 entire Cubas worth of people, or an average of 7,500,000 every six months—and India did it without Marxism–Leninism or even a commitment to communism (though they did have a partially-planned economy from until 1991). Similarly, if you add India to that graph of infant mortality, the range of the y-axis quadruples just to fit the Indian rate in 1960, and whilst today it is still several times the rates of Cuba, the US and the UK, the reduction is just phenomenal. Infant mortality worldwide has more than halved since 1960. And on education spend as a share of GDP, Cuba is an outlier even amongst other Marxist–Leninist countries: Vietnam is #91, China is #110 and Laos #154. Meanwhile, the Scandinavian social democracies—Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland—are all in the top 20.

I’m not here to try and Hans Rosling all of the magic out of the Cuban political project; many of its achievements are genuinely incredible, especially given its limited resource and the continual spectre of the blockade, and Rosling’s use of those similar figures to defend the current world order are similarly vulnerable to criticism. But they do show that Marxism–Leninism alone is neither necessary nor sufficient for the achievements that have been made. Many of the examples I cited above show that the gains of the Cuban Revolution come within the context of worldwide improvements, or of similar advances made in countries that have adopted very different economic systems. To quote someone I met in Mexico, it shows that maybe ideology isn’t the whole story; things like penicillin are good, and things like hand washing are also good. But, in the light of my previous conclusions about democracy in Cuba, examples like the education spending⁷⁷ show that the very just priorities of the Cuban project are not necessarily dependent on its current Marxist–Leninist ideology, just as the Revolution itself wasn’t. Cubans claimed back their nation and their right to self-determination, and there is no reason to assume that if the Cubans were to implement a pluralistic democracy they would choose to give up their social services or strong sense of community:⁷⁸

For many Cubans, though, decades of ideology can now be boiled down to two services: free health care and a strong public education system. In conversations in Matanzas Province and Havana, these two services were often cited as the priorities they would never give up. An injection of capitalism, American culture and more inequity among social classes seemed to be of less concern than protecting these pillars of the socialized state.

Obviously, this would require some smart structural work⁷⁹ to ensure that an ideologically-redirected Cuba would not be torn apart by foreign capital as was the former Soviet Union.⁸⁰ We in Britain had a health service, if we could keep it, and we proved that we could not; the loss of the Cuban health service would be a loss not just for Cuba, but for the world, and should absolutely be avoided. But as much as the PCC tries to conflate itself with the Revolution, and itself with the people of Cuba, the Revolution succeeded independent of it and the Cuban political project would be more than able to continue independent of it again, as would the people of Cuba, should they choose to do so. And the pragmatist in me wonders if reforming from a post-Cold War Marxist–Leninist holdout into a highly protectionist democratic socialist state, with the same peace- and justice-focussed foreign policy (along with their distant neighbour Costa Rica), would serve the cause of removing the core justification for the blockade (though I am not so naïve as to think it would disappear overnight), allowing the project the breathing room it has long deserved, without betraying its principles; such a Cuba could well prove to be about as benevolent a state as is possible.⁸¹

As Castro himself said, upon arriving in Havana after the overthrow of the dictator:

The Revolution is still being led by an army in battle order. Who, now and in the future, may be the enemies of the Revolution? Who, standing before this victorious people, could be the future enemies of the Revolution? The worst enemies which the Cuban Revolution could face in the future are us, the revolutionaries.

This is what I always told the rebel fighters: when we no longer have the enemy before us, when the war is over, we ourselves are potentially the only enemies of the Revolution…

I say and I swear before my compatriots that if any of my comrades, or our movement, or I myself, prove to be the slightest obstacle to the nation’s peace, from this very moment the people may do with all of us what they will, and tell us what we must do.

The Marxist–Leninist ideology and its attendant authoritarianism appear to now be an obstacle to the nation’s peace, whilst also not being a vital necessity for any of the achievements that people laud Cuba for. The Marxist–Leninist experiment has been run many times over the past century, and it has always failed; the state does not wither away, it just ossifies and grows at the expense of the people until it either finds a relatively stable equilibrium or overextends and brings the whole project down with it. Marxism–Leninism clearly does not lead to a communist society, that much is clear. A Cuba that was willing to abandon that project, whilst remaining socialist, would have a world to win.

What is to be Done? ¶

The challenge represented by ending the blockage is huge. There is no point in appealing to any sense of morality or justice amongst the squalid ghouls that populate the US foreign policy apparatus; these are the same creatures who will hear that their sanctions are killing half a million children and glibly declare that they think it’s worth it. Cynically, trying to mobilise popular opposition against the blockade within the US is a long shot, as the wishes of the American people have very little sway over the direction of the federal government, particularly (in this case) whilst the Miami exiles remain such a potent voting bloc (though to try is still better than to not). And, most relevantly for our delegation (and all but one of the delegations that made up the Brigade), we don’t even live in the US.

The one unilateral option open to the Cuban government is what I have just discussed,⁸² but for us, there is only person-to-person solidarity. We (and the Brigade as a whole) demonstrated this in abundance, bringing suitcases full of medical and educational supplies with us which were then distributed during our visits. Not only that, but by visiting the country at all (which, for the Yanks, meant being harassed by border thugs upon their return home)⁸³ we brought much-needed foreign currency in with us and can take stories out with us; per one of the few practical suggestions in the conference workshop, we can tell others to visit, too, and do likewise. We can educate ourselves about the Cuban Revolution and the remarkable successes that their political project has achieved since; we can be forthright, though fair, in pointing out its problems, and choose to provide critical friendship over meaningless flattery, which would do more harm in the long run. We must be windows to within and advocates from without, but never propagandists, who invariably undermine their own credibility and soon become useless.

So, in (finally) closing, I say:

• ¡abajo el bloqueo!, without equivocation;
• solidarity with the Cuban people, as to all peoples, and their right to determine their own fate without the US or the PCC interfering; and, of course,
• ¡viva la Decimosexta Brigada!

The second Europespedition expanded on this the subsequent summer, as I toured the UK visiting friends I had made at university before WWOOFing on a farm in Normandy and working at a hostel near Amsterdam.

The past couple years haven’t been great for the travelling-inclined, but as of late summer 2022 most places outside of Asia had started to re-open. I had big travel plans brewing that would see me far from my home continent for the best part of a year (or perhaps longer), as well as several continental friends both old and new that I wanted to visit before I left. I was also newly unemployed, flush with free time and keen to run a couple small-scale experiments in advance of my larger trip.

Also, I had been planning an Interrailing trip before I went to university which never came to fruition, so this seemed a prime opportunity to finally dust off that idea.

Leeds, Edinburgh & Belper, GB ¶

After pushing some last-minute tweaks to my tracker site and buying some new hiking boots, I boarded a train heading north. Astute map fans may note here that northward is not a Europeanward direction, but I wanted to start the trip by visiting a couple of UK-based friends first.

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Firstly, Leeds to meet up with an old university friend for a couple pints and a catch-up many years in the waiting. Afterwards, I headed to somewhere that (at time of writing) is still part of the UK: Edinburgh. I only went to see a couple friends, but unbeknownst to me I had managed to schedule my trip during the Fringe, as well as during a lengthy bin strike, so the city was both way more exciting and way worse-smelling than I had anticipated.

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I made the most of the Fringe during my short time there, seeing several shows:

• Angel, a one-woman play about Rojava that left me cold;
• Alfie Brown, who I summarised as having the structure of Stewart Lee with the delivery of Tim Minchin;
• The Tragedy of Macbeth, a very odd and very messy but absolutely fascinating rendition, complete with a very odd clown-based interlude;
• a variety stand-up show called Shaggers that defied both me and my friend’s expectations by not being shit;
• Jonny and the Baptists, who I’ve loved both times I’ve seen them; and
• Alice Fraser, who I was intrigued to see in the flesh after years of listening to her on the Bugle.

I also managed to fit in a tour of Holyrood and a delicious haggis, as well as staying with a couple of pals, and on the way back down south I stopped in Derbyshire to visit a farming co-op.

Italy ¶

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Next stop, the continent! Having never been to Italy previously, I flew to the toe of the boot to spend a lovely week with a new friend. Somehow over the preceding few weeks, Maybe I can see about popping in to see you at the tail end of the trip became I’ll stay with you for a week at the start; not bad, considering we’d only met a month earlier.

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We swam in the sea, played card games with her father and explored the nearby areas by car and by bike. We visited the destinctive-looking clifftop town of Tropea, the Scolacium Archeological Park and the mountaintop village of Stalettì at night, where I briefly became disoriented when I looked out of the window and couldn’t determine the horizon between the black starry night and its reflection in the sea. Later, swimming in that same pitch black sea, I felt like I was floating in space before it all started to feel a bit too sublime (i.e., terrifying) and I swiftly got back out. Of course, we also had some of the finest pizza I’ve ever had and I managed to get myself wildly sunburnt. On the day I left, we hiked around Sila National Park and encountered a friendly cow.

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Then it was off to Rome to reuinte with fellow Monkey Runner Paolo. Serendipitously, it turned out that his job is managing trip itineries for tourists so, after eating and drank and rolling past the Colosseum late at night, in the morning I set off alone, armed with the most efficient route for hitting all of the key tourist spots.

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Amongst the Pantheon, Colosseum and others were a spot I had insisted on: the long-neglected (and feral cat-housing) Largo di Torre Argentina in which Julius Caesar was assassinated. I also took a detour to visit the Vatican and unintentionally stalked a priest bringing his shopping home before hopping on my next train.

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Next I headed to Venice for a night. Arriving in the evening and leaving early in the morning I only saw the night-time Venice so familiar from hundreds of films, though that proved a minor problem when I tried to get some quick food for myself and ended up sat by a canal, having the dulcet sounds of an accordion waft over me as I ate the most romantic lasagne for one in my life.

Zagreb, HR ¶

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I’d been planning a Sziget reunion shortly before the pandemic came along and ruined everything. Whilst one of my festival wives had pre-empted me by going over to Central America, my other wife was still in Zagreb, so I went to visit her. We went for drinks and pizza the first night I was there, and then the spent the next day traipsing around the city with Anna, a Dutch girl I had met on the train—my first time on a vintage one with individual compartments and suchlike! We met with Lucija again later that night for more drinks in an intriguing UV-lit bar called Alcatraz. I left the next morning, but not before trying (unsuccessfully) to visit the Što čitaš infoshop, which was shut.

Ljubljana, SI ¶

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I hadn’t originally put Slovenia on my itinerary, knowing it only as that place that Slavoj Žižek is from. However, after viewing it out of the train windows on the way to Zagreb I couldn’t help myself. The heavily pedestrianised city centre was, similarly to Venice, lovely to stroll around in the evening, and I headed to a bar with my hostel roommates to watch a basketball match (a sport for which Slovenians are apparently mad). On the way back, we stumbled across some sort of sponteneous dancefloor in the middle of a plaza, and then climbed up to Ljubljana Castle to view the city below.

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The next day, we joined a walking tour of the city centre, but I had to leave it early to visit a couple other sides before leaving. After a long, rainy walk I reached the National Museum of Contemporary History, which features some really interesting material on a very interesting country, as well as a massive bust of Tito’s head.

On my way to the train station I made a detour to visit Metelkova, which was interesting but I wouldn’t recommend doing without a local friend, and definitely wouldn’t recommend doing carrying a massive backpack that screams tourist.

Villach, AT & Munich, DE ¶

I now had a few days before I had to be in Paris to meet someone, several travel days on my Interrail pass and no real plan for where to go next. I had dreams of just picking random stops for places west of me based solely on how much I liked the names, but it became pretty clear pretty quickly that the rail network in this area of the world terminates in a handful of bottlenecks, Villach being one. The town was nice enough, though seemingly designed as some sort of retiree-friendly community—I’ve never seen an outdoor stairlift before—but Villacher Brauhof made good currywurst and better beer, so I was happy.

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As part of my genius plan, I decided to save money on hostels by sleeping on trains through the night. Unfortunatey, the timings were such that I never had more than a few hours of uninterrupted sleep time, and several of those hours were spent in Munich Hauptbanhof around midnight: not the most pleasant venue for a nap. I did go for a short stroll around the station though, primarily to visit the Kurt Eisner memorial (the German Revolution has always interested me), but also for a beer and a currywurst.

Also, it was on my train from Munich that I messaged a friend something silly and was told to check the news: the Queen had just popped her clogs and, even more surprising and horrifying, I also learned that Liz Truss was now the Prime Minister. From this point on, every time I told someone I was from England they would ask how I was taking the sad news and I had to explain to them that me and Liz (Windsor, not Truss) had only ever had a professional relationship, and I was not particularly affected by the loss.

Alsace, FR ¶

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With minimal sleep and still a long day to go before mon amie Parisienne would be finished with work, I decided to meander down the Alsace region. Starting with Strasbourg and arriving at 5am, I wandered around La Petite France waiting for a coffee place to open whilst the city woke up around me. I also saw a charming shop window tribute to Her Maj:

Many hours and several coffees later I headed over to Colmar, after which I headed to Mulhouse, but then the heavens opened before I got a chance to explore.

Paris, FR ¶

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Finally I arrived in Paris, one of my least favourite cities in the world, to see one of my favourite people. We admired the miserable skyline from the Place Georges Pompidor, we flâneured, strolled along the Seine and went to a stand-up show—I was interested to see how the performance was influenced by the French tradition of mime, in comparison to British stand-up which often has more of a music hall or pantomime heritage.

Then it was off to a house party where I held my own reasonably well in a philosophical discussion about my favourite Camus works, conducted (mostly) in French. Also, one girl who identified as an avid royalty stan kept playing God Save the Queen which, amidst all of the French house, led to a very idiosyncratic party playlist vibe.

Hungover the next morning and having not left enough time to traverse the Metro, I narrowly missed the coach I’d booked to Amsterdam. Luckily, I found a last-minute ride on BlaBlaCar and zoomed off regardless. Trying to talk a bit of Arabic with another Saudi passenger, I realised I’d used five different languages in the past week and my well-mashed brain was starting to lose the ability to speak English.

The Netherlands ¶

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My final stop before heading back to the UK was the Netherlands. Firstly, I wanted to make a pilgrimage back to the Flying Pig Beach Hostel—perpetual feature of all prior Europespeditions—and see how things had changed in the seven years since I was last there; not much, as it turns out, and I couldn’t have been happier to see that.

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Whilst there, I also ran into a guy called Ben: he had arrived as a guest back when I was working there, extended his stay and then started volunteering shortly before I left; it was great to see that he’s still there, and now managing the place.

After Noordwijk I headed to Amsterdam to reunite with another Monkey Runner. Along with some good beers, I also finally crossed off a bucket list item: cycling in Amsterdam.

London, GB ¶

I met a lovely Finnish girl on the flight back to the UK and then killed time in the capital for a day whilst I waited for my other favourite Frenchie to finish work. We caught up and I stayed with another friend in London before heading back home for a one-day turnaround for my next trip…

Men of any worth or value soon come to see that they are in the hands of Fate, and gratefully submit to be moulded by its teachings. They recognise that the fruit of life is experience, and not happiness…

I recently finished reading Arthur Schopenhauer’s 1851 collection of essays Parerga and Paralipomena. The title words being Greek for appendices and omissions, respectively, the essays were intended to expand on elements of Schopenhaeuer’s philosophy for those readers already familiar with it. Despite not being that, nonetheless I found the essays to stand respectively on their own merits, and Schopenhauer to be both a clear and insightful thinker and an incredible curmudgeon—I suppose that’s what a life of philosophical pessimism does to you.

This post will go through some of my thoughts on the various articles, which cover a whole host of topics and, as may be expected from an aphoristic a writer as Schopenhauer, will be liberally sprinkled with quotes.

The Wisdom of Life ¶

Here Schopenhauer muses on the wisdom he has accumulated over his long life (he was 63 when the collection was released), including his system of philosophical pessimism. On the notion of a good life, he writes that

A quiet and cheerful temperament, happy in the enjoyment of a perfectly sound physique, an intellect clear, lively, penetrating and seeing things as they are, a moderate and gentle will, and therefore a good conscience—these are the privileges which no rank or wealth can make up for or replace.

One of the more progressive elements of Schopenhauer’s philosophy was his advocacy for animal welfare, as he considered animals to be …beings like us, whose existence is but an infinitesimal moment between two eternities. Meanwhile, on the topic of interpersonal relations he writes that the advantage of beauty is that it is …an open letter of recommendation, predisposing the heart to favour the person who presents it. He criticises the use of ad hominem attacks (of which he experienced no small share), writing that

[I]f a man abuses another, he is simply showing that he has no real or true causes of complaint against him; as, otherwise, he would bring these forward as the premises and rely upon his hearers to draw the conclusion themselves, instead of which, he gives the conclusion and leaves out the premises, trusting that people will suppose that he has done so only for the sake of being brief.

Schopenhauer is cautious as a result: Now, unfortunately, if we want to take a serious view of any question, we have first of all to consider whether it will not give offence in some way or other to the dullard, who generally shows alarm and resentment at the merest sign of intelligence…

Counsels and Maxims ¶

Schopenhauer begins with a justification:

I have simply put down those of my thoughts which appear to be worth communicating—thoughts which, as far as I know, have not been uttered, or, at any rate, not just in the same form, by any one else; so that my remarks may be taken as a supplement to what has been already achieved in the immense field [of guidance for life].

Here Schopenhauer’s pessimism is evidence by aphorisms like [t]here is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome—to be got over and …there is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one’s efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire. He even prefigures one of my favourite elements of Camus with the quote that forms this post’s epigram.

Schopenhauer also has no time for respect unearned by conduct or wisdom, writing that

…while Nature sets very wide differences between man and man in respect both of morality and of intellect, society disregards and effaces them; or, rather, it sets up artificial differences in their stead—gradations of rank and position, which are very often diametrically opposed to those which Nature establishes.

A lot of time is devoted to Schopenhauer justifying why he was such a friendless loner (it’s because he was just so damn smart, don’t you see?). Considering being surrounded by friends to be a …deficiency of quality in those we meet…to some extent [being] compensated [for] by an increase in quantity, he adds that [i]t is natural for great minds—the true teachers of humanity—to care little about the constant company of others; just as little as the schoolmaster cares for joining in the gambols of the noisy crowd of boys which surrounds him.

He is also wary of forgiveness. To become reconciled to a friend with whom you have broken, he writes, is a form of weakness; and you pay the penalty of it when he takes the first opportunity of doing precisely the very thing which brought about the breach; nay, he does it the more boldly, because he is secretly conscious that you cannot get on without him.

Finally, he concludes with counsel to live in the moment, rather than the future or the past, as a route to true happiness. [T]he first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary.

Religion: A Dialogue ¶

This essay takes the form of a dialogue between the religious Demopheles and the irreligious Philalethes. Whilst the latter argues that [t]he power of religious dogma, when inculcated early, is such as to stifle conscience, compassion and finally every feeling of humanity, the former begs his companion to …take religion cum grano salis…to see that you must meet the requirements of the people according to the measure of their comprehension. He states that

…truth, which is inexpressible except by means of myth and allegory, is like water, which can be carried about only in vessels; a philosopher who insists on obtaining it pure is like a man who breaks the jug in order to get the water by itself…religion is truth allegorically and mythically expressed, and so rendered attainable and digestible by mankind in general.

Philalethes is not against making the odd dig at his friend:

Demopheles

[Religion] takes the place of that pure philosophical truth which is infinitely difficult and perhaps never attainable.

Philalethes

Ah! just as a wooden leg takes the place of a natural one; it supplies what is lacking, barely does duty for it, claims to be regarded as a natural leg, and is more or less artfully put together...

Demopheles

hat may be, but still for a man who hasn't a natural leg, a wooden one is of great service.

Overall, Demopheles’ arguments boil down to two major points: his view that Philalethes has …no notion how stupid most people are, and his belief that …the chief aim of [religion] is not so much to make this life pleasant as to render us worthy of a better, whether that better life literally exists or not.

Philalethes is not convinced, retorting that

It is easy to let adulation of the Deity make amends for lack of proper behaviour towards man. And so we see that in all times and in all countries the great majority of mankind find it much easier to beg their way into heaven by prayers than to deserve to go there by their actions.

He ends by presenting Demopheles with a hypothetical designed to test his faith in faith’s civilising influence:

Just think; if a public proclamation were suddenly made, announcing the repeal of all the criminal laws; I fancy neither you not I would have the courage to go home from here under the protection of religious motives. If, in the same way, all religions were declared untrue, we could, under the protection of laws alone, go on living as before, without any special addition to our apprehensions or our measures of precaution.

It’s hard to tell which view Schopenhauer subscribed to. On the one hand, Philalethes criticises religion’s influence behind a great many historic atrocities, including the trans-Atlantic slave trade which Schopenhauer was heavily critical of. On the other, an entry in the later essay A Few Parables suggests a Demopheles-esque view on the irreligious:

A mother gave her children Æsop’s fables to read, in the hope of educating and improving their minds; but they very soon brought the book back, and the eldest, wise beyond his years, delivered himself as follows: This is no book for us; it’s much too childish and stupid. You can’t make us believe that foxes and wolves and ravens are able to talk; we’ve got beyond stories of that kind! In these young hopefuls you have the enlightened Rationalists of the future.

On Books and Reading ¶

For a man who wrote a bunch of stuff, one of Schopenhauer’s stranger targets of criticism is the very act of reading. When we read, he writes, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. Later, in On Thinking for Oneself, he adds that [t]o read another’s thoughts is like taking the leavings of a meal to which we have not been invited, or putting on the clothes which some unknown visitor has laid aside. To the well-read Schopenhauer, true genius does not spend all its time reading, but thinking. The irony is not commented upon.

The Art of Literature ¶

And yet, he goes on to offer an entire essay of writing advice. Claiming that …nothing is easier than to write so that no-one can understand; just as, contrarily, nothing is more difficult than to express deep things in such a way that everyone must necessarily grasp them and that [e]very word that can be spared is hurtful if it remains, he surmises that [t]rue brevity of expression consists in everywhere saying only what is worth saying, and in avoiding tedious detail about things which everyone can supply for himself.

The Vanity of Existence ¶

The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to be found in them, unless you stand some distance off. So, to gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again. We look upon the present as something to be put up with while it lasts and serving only as the way towards our goal. Hence most people, if they glance back when they come to the end of life, will find that all along they have been living ad interim: they will be surprised to find that the very thing they disregarded and let slip by unenjoyed was just the life in the expectation of which they passed all their time.

Further Psychological Observations ¶

Another collection of aphorisms, including:

Reason deserves to be called a prophet; for in showing us the consequence and effect of our actions in the present, does it not tell us what the future will be?

…if a man sets out to hate all the miserable creatures he meets, he will not have much energy left for anything else; whereas he can despise them, one and all, with the greatest ease.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

On Human Nature ¶

Schopenhauer really was a miserable git:

How shall man be proud, when his conception is a crime, his birth a penalty, his life a labour, and death a necessity!

When you come into contact with a man, no matter whom, do not attempt an objective appreciation of him according to his worth and dignity. Do not consider his bad will, or his narrow understanding and perverse ideas; as the former may easily lead you to hate and the latter to despise him; but fix your attentions only upon his sufferings, his needs, his anxieties, his pains. Then you will always feel your kindship with him; you will sympathize with him; and instead of hatred or contempt, you will experience the commiseration that alone is the peace to which the Gospel calls us.

Therefore let even the young be instructed betimes that in this masquerade the apples are of wax, the flowers of silk, the fish of pasteboard, and that all things—yes, all things—are toys and trifles; and that of two men whom he may see earnestly engaged in business, one is supplying spurious goods and the other paying for them in false coin.

Character ¶

I observe in myself that at one moment I regard all mankind with heartfelt pity, at another with the greatest indifference, on occasion, with hatred, nay, with a positive enjoyment of their pain.

Government ¶

At the end of the collection, and having not commented on the topic previously, Schopenhauer lays out his views on government. To begin with, he laments that

…whereas between one individual and another, and so far as concerns the law and morality of their relations, the principle, Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t like done to yourself, certainly applies, it is the converse of this principle which is appropriate in the case of nations and in politics: What you wouldn’t like done to yourself, do to others.

and adds that [e]very State looks upon its neighbours as at bottom a horde of robbers, who will fall upon it as soon as they have the opportunity. He also lays out his version of the the Hobbesian state of nature and social contract, writing that

…originally it was not right, but might, that ruled in the world. Might has the advantage of having been first in the field. That is why it is impossible to do away with it and abolish it altogether; it must always have its place; and all that a man can wish or ask is that it should be found on the side of right and associated with it.

Ultimately, [r]ight in itself is powerless; in nature it is Might that rules. To enlist might on the side of right, so that by means of it right may rule, is the problem of statesmanship and …right, if it is to gain a footing in the world and really prevail, must of necessity be supplemented by a small amount of arbitrary force.

Most impactful, I thought, was his criticism of the USA—all criticisms that are still relevant today, over a century and a half later:

The United States of North America exhibit the attempt…to allow abstract right to prevail pure and unalloyed. But the result is not attractive. For with all the material prosperity of the country what do we find? The prevailing sentiment is a base Utilitarianism with its inevitable companion, ignorance; and it is this that has paved the way for a union of stupid Anglican bigotry, foolish prejudice, coarse brutality, and a childish veneration of women. Even worse things are the order of the day: most iniquitous oppression of the black freedmen, lynch law, frequent assassination often committed with entire impunity, duels of a savagery elsewhere unknown, now and then open scorn of all law and justice, repudiation of public debts, abominable political rascality towards a neighbouring State, followed by a mercenary raid on its rich territory—afterwards thought to be excused, on the part of the chief authority of the State, by lies which every one in the country knew to be such and laughed at—an ever-increasing ochlocracy, and finally all the disastrous influence which this abnegation of justice in high quarters must have exercised on private morals.

A punk rock song won’t ever change the world/But I can tell you about a couple that changed me

The phrase is that one should kill their idols (or heroes), which can apply to both definitions of the word as God is just as dead as the author. Pat the Bunny Schneeweis has been my favourite musician for a number of years now but I’ve never really had to think about why that is, until now. His lyrics strike so many chords with me and his chords are punk-fast enough to suit my hip trendy young person needs whilst being played on all the wrong instruments means those lyrics come through loud and clear. He sings with a screeching passion about apathy, youthful self-destructiveness and the painful realisation that politics will never be fixed by him or his friends, but tempered with the realisation that it’s the him and his friends that really matters, and the politics can go hang. There’s no guarantee he meant any of the things I’ve taken away from his lyrics in the way I have done so, but having read all the interviews I could find he seems like a smart guy (even if some of his interview choices are goofy), and hey: this isn’t a review of Pat the Bunny so much as it’s a review of my Pat the Bunny. Barthes’d be proud.

To start with, I’ll outline Pat the Bunny’s oeuvre to make following along a bit easier, then go through mostly chronologically in order to construct a narrative, ignoring bits that challenge it and cherrypicking bits that seem to support it. This isn’t academia; this is some berk on a blog.

Punknews.org

His first project was Johnny Hobo and the Freight Trains, a rough collective that would perform with just Schneeweis as often as with a band. From Johnny Hobo came: Anarchy Means I Hate You, a 2003 demo; Caught in the Act of Not Being Awesome, a 2005 live recording; Live at Bandit H.Q., a 2005 split with Captain Chaos (the solo moniker of Chris Clavin of Ghost Mice, who I’ll probably gush about at some point too); Love Songs for the Apocalypse, a 2005 split with Mantits (who I probably won’t, but who is still worth checking out if only to have his name show up in your music library); All Power to the Wingnuts and Easter Sunday Hangover, two 2005 EPs; and Chaos Infiltration Squad, a 2006 EP.

Johnny Hobo fell apart but Schneeweis returned with Wingnut Dishwashers Union, who produced: Towards a World Without Dishwashers, a 2007 demo; Never Trust a Man Who Plays Guitar, a 2008 live recording; and Burn the Earth, Leave it Behind, a 2009 studio album and potentially my favourite of all Pat the Bunny’s stuff. In 2009 Wingnut Dishwashers Union, too, folded, although this time because Schneeweis entered rehab for the heroin addiction.

In 2011, the now-clean Schneeweis returned with Ramshackle Glory, a new collective and the band currently up and running. He released a solo album called Die the Nightmare in early 2011 which consisted of solo acoustic covers of the songs featured on Live the Dream, the first Ramshackle Glory studio album, released in late 2011, and the other potential candidate for my favourite of all his stuff. 2012 saw Who Are Your Friends Gonna Be?, another studio album, and 2013 brought The Mark Inside and The Volatile Utopian Real Estate Market—two more Pat the Bunny solo albums—and Shelter, a split with Ghost Mice.

The narrative I’d somewhat constructed in my head as I listened to him mirrors the development of thought from around the 19^th century up to the modern day. Whilst that sounds goofy, what I mean by it is the rough change from idealistic Romanticism and the “gonna change the world” utopian ideals it brought with it to nihilism and the death of utopia. However, as I have a tendency to bring up Camus wherever possible, I’ll add that some of the lyrics in Ramshackle Glory’s songs speak to a recognition of the value of a personal utopia rather than a grand societal one, and of creating one’s own meaning and living right in a sick system that’s not likely to change any time soon. This is all nicely encapsulated in a quote from Schneeweis’ description of The Volatile Utopian Real Estate Market:

Anarchism penetrated my thinking twelve years ago, and no other conception of life has threatened to supplant it since. Yet there is no apparent path from this world to another. I have no solution to this dilema. So these are songs about sticking it out anyway—probably not due to any rationality on my part, but also not just out of stubbornness.

This also relates to the development of anarchism, a more precise thread throughout Schneeweis’ work, from the days of the Spanish Civil War and Kronstadt Mutiny to post-left anarchism, derogatorily referred to as lifestyle anarchism by some, today. This this end, I’ll keep bringing up the Curious George Brigade’s cracking Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs, largely because it covers all the bases relevant to this topic and is easily readable for free. Also it’s a bit good, so get on that; it’s only a hundred or so pages.

marginal-lines @ DeviantArt

A lot of Pat the Bunny’s lyrics are about heroin, which obviously isn’t particularly relevant to me, but everyone’s had a bit too much sauce at least once and I imagine (although could well be wrong) that the misery afterwards is like a massively watered-down version of dopesickness. For those unable to extrapolate, there’s also plenty of lyrics about drinking, because Schneeweis is nothing if not a crowd-pleaser. More pertinent to my grand narrative and also, I’m willing to assume, speaking to a much broader kind of experience is that sense of disgust at the prevelance of an unjust system, particularly when it’s one that you are helping to perpetuate solely by your inaction against it. From the small scale example of a teacher abusing their authority to the larger and more systematic one of police brutality, or even the very notion of capital, I don’t think it’s overstepping the mark to say that everyone has a realisation like this quite early on, although some are more apt at accepting it as the unchangeable status quo and moving on than others:¹

But I swear to god, I’m gonna die/Full of naive optimism; a teenager’s heartbreaking conviction that/Things can be different. Oh yeah, things are gonna be real different/When we’re finished around here.

Sometimes that youthful rebellion manifests itself without any particular target:

Well, you know that I hate a lot of things/But I also hate a lot of other things! Oh, yeah!

But sometimes it hones in on a particular grievance:

I can’t believe that bastard won this morning/It’s the kind of night for vodka and forties!

We might not have forties in England, and I may not be a vodka man, but I can certainly empathise with that first sentiment. So, having identified these issues with society, what is the man to do? The same thing as everyone: surely something, whilst unsure of the something. Perhaps he’ll start small:²

And so you’re asking me, who does the dishes after the revolution?/Well, I do my own dishes now, I’ll do my own dishes then/And it’s always the ones who don’t who ask that fucking question.

Along the way, he might make some unexpected allies:

And lately I’ve been thinking about how I love Jesus/Because Jesus was a dirty homeless hippie peace activist.

And eventually, even the loftiest goals will be fulfilled:

We’re building a new world, all of my friends and me/It’s not an exact science yet, but we have the technology.

Thank God it’s that easy, right?

Curious George Brigade

Of course it’s not, and as I said before, Schneeweis is clearly a smart guy. He’s acutely aware of the deficiencies of his own scene be they the insincerity of his assumed allies:³

He’s at the show/Talking feminism to get into your pants, oh yeah/Well he’ll quote Emma Goldman/But he’ll never get up to dance⁴

He talks revolution for an hour without using any verbs

Or the sense of it all being a David and Goliath fight, but thanks a lot Nietzsche; God’s dead and we don’t stand a chance:

There’s no ballot we can cast to set us free/But there’s no brick we can throw that will end poverty/You can’t blow up SB1070

Anarchism is undoubtedly a flawed world. It’s history, whilst rich, is littered with the corpses of a thousand revolutionaries, from Spain to Ukraine; all the good intentions in the world won’t stop a hail of fascist (or communist, respectively) bullets. Whilst nowadays killings are rarer (alas, not rare enough), anarchism (along with any sort of opposition to the powers that be, the dinosaur left⁵ or no) is still heavily suppressed, in the US by a terrifyingly militarised police force, the UK by things like the Public Order Act 1986, Russia by just about everything under the sun, etc. That’s perhaps to be expected when going up against the system that owns the guns (settle down America, they own bigger guns than you), but does it mean there’s no hope for change? No chance for freedom, so buckle down and go get a job at a law firm? I don’t think I’m qualified to answer that, nor is anyone. Worth a shot though, surely?

This marks a handy place to look at the philosophical side of Pat the Bunny’s lyrics. Anarchism as a political outlook is ideally indistinguishable from anarchism as a philosophical approach to life; freedom in both arenas should be intertwined, think Emma Goldman’s dancing quote. To the Patmobile!

God gave me instructions on how to live my life/But I couldn’t read his handwriting so I burnt them last night […] God isn’t dead/But I’ll get that bastard someday!

And if our only gift is this dark black void, to me that’s okay/Because our nihilism is the terrorist wing of youthful apathy

Hah! You thought all those Nietzsche references were me trying to sound high-brow? To quote the title of The Wire’s behind-the-scenes video, it’s all connected.

Friedrich Hermann Hartmann

Gott ist tot is such a marvellous phrase and Fred should be thanked for giving it unto us, the unworthy untermensch. As a quick aside, the meaning of the phrase is not literally that God existed and has been murdered, but that God as a concept we (read: humanity) needed to explain away the unknown and grant us the meaning in which to live our lives is no longer necessary; in the terminology of Stirner, God is just another spook. Unlike Kierkegaard, who decided that the only way to respond to the Absurd is to make an equally absurd leap of faith into religion or be left with options of either suicide or the demoniac madness of accepting the unacceptable (the thread Camus later ran with; more on him in a bit), Nietzsche said there was no meaning, all morality is subjective and you just gotta live with that. That must’ve been exhausting. It’s also worth noting that the words come, within the fiction of the book, from a madman, so who knows what Nietzsche really meant, but we can Barthes that into meaninglessness too so let’s do that. Whilst God may be dead in the sense of our need for him, as the lyric from Church Hymn for the Condemned points out, God himself isn’t as dead yet as he perhaps should be. God continues to cling on to the ledge over the abyss, and no amount of stamping on his fingers seems to be finishing the job.

God gave us the instructions by which to live our lives (you’ve probably encountered at least ten of them), but with his omniscience must have seen his death coming; his hands were probably shaking quite a bit as he scrawled them down, and the result came out unreadable. No worries, just burn them up and wing it:

Here’s to our lives being meaningless/And how beautiful it is because freedom doesn’t have a purpose

Freedom may not have a purpose, but it gives one to Schneeweis and millions of others throughout the pages of history. Given a purpose in a purposeless life—hey, who’s that over there?

Henri Cartier-Bresson

There’s the dashing French rascal: Albert Camus, forefather of Absurdism.⁶ Now to give that the absurdly rushed and oversimplified summary that nihilism just got. The Absurd is the cognitive dissonance that occurs between a person’s natural drive to find out the meaning behind existence and a person’s inability to to do, or the lack thereof. As I said earlier, there are three outcomes to this: suicide; a leap of faith; or acceptance. Camus chose acceptance as a form of rebellion. In The Myth of Sisyphus, another fantastic book, after detailing Sisyphus of ancient Greek mythology’s poor lot (for his crimes he was condemned to forever push a boulder up a mountain, whereupon it would immediately roll back down again into towers, elephants and a castle) and its metaphorical relation to our own lot, sums it up thusly:

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

In other words, Sisyphus has to bring himself around to enjoy his pointless task, because to do otherwise is to be crushed by it (and it’d also be drastically easier to see the brighter side of that compared to someone like Prometheus). Does this actually relate to Pat the Bunny, or have I gone off on one to spaff my book learning all over everything? First, don’t be bringing that toxic attitude to my blog. Second, yes it does. After embracing the Absurd, one is free to create meaning. There’s no guarantee that there is any objective meaning, but there might be. Either way, you’ll never know, so make your own. It’s just as valid as anyone else’s. In this regard Absurdism is something like existential agnosticism. As Pat the Bunny goes on to say:

But I take the beauty of chaos over anyone else’s perfection

Well I’m starting to believe these highways don’t lead anywhere/But I’m starting to believe that I don’t really care

That first lyric in particular is a good example of what I’m trying to say: his chaos is preferable to another’s perfection because both are arbitrary, yet his chaos his.⁷ Chaos is an integral part to anarchism, even if some try to hide it in an attempt to make anarchism more palatable to the widest audience,⁸ but Schneeweis embraces it; even if he’s headed for that dark black void mentioned before, he’s not succumbing to it just yet. Futile or not, he’s still going to fight, even if it’s whilst acutely aware of the potential pointlessness of doing so:

I tell you my friend William came to me with a message of hope
It went fuck you and everything that you think you know
If you don’t step outside the things that you believe they’re gonna kill you
He said no-one’s gonna stop you from dying young and miserable and right
But if you want something better, you gotta put that shit aside […]
Now I’m not saying that we can’t change the world
‘cause everybody does at least a little bit of that
But I won’t shit myself, the way I’m living is a temper tantrum
And I need something, need something else
Need something else to stay alive

And even if he doesn’t see the complete overthrow of society coming any time soon, he can take refuge in the smaller things:

So I don’t want to kill a cop/What I want is neighborhoods where they don’t have to get called/When the shit goes down/‘cause our friends, they are enough, and our neighbors have enough/Finally we’re enough

At the end of the day, perhaps the capital-R Revolution isn’t worth dying for, but his friends? That’s a different matter entirely:

I’ll join you in that grave you’re digging/If there’s room enough for two

Vert et Noir @ Wikimedia Commons

In Closing ¶

That’s all the gushing for now, I feel. Maybe I’ve made a hash of it and completely missed the points of Schneeweis, Nietzsche, Camus or any combination of the three, or maybe I’ve written a gush that will only be of interest to people who have already drunk the Schneeweis Kool-Aid, but I’ve been wanting to write this one for a while and I also felt like I was neglecting my baby by not writing anything for such long stretches of time. Before I finish up, I’ll leave you with a list of some good starting points for some of the things brought up in this article:

Recommended Reading ¶

Obviously, I’ll start with Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs as it’s one of the clearest, most reasonable explanations of this strand of modern anarchism I’ve read. You can buy a physical copy from here for $10, and there’s also a free ebook available from the same site (the only ebook I’ve found that isn’t a scanned .pdf).

As far as Pat the Bunny songs, I have a number of favourites.

From Johnny Hobo: No Trespassing Waltz, New Mexico Song, Harmony Parking Lot and Church Hymn for the Condemned.
From Wingnut Dishwashers Union: Never Trust a Man Who Plays Guitar, Fuck Shit Up (Whanana), Fuck Every Cop (Who Ever Did His Job) and My Idea of Fun.
From Ramshackle Glory: More About Alcoholism, From Here to Utopia (Song for the Desperate), Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist, First Song, Part 2 and Eulogy for an Adolescence Shattered Against Elliot Street Pavement.
As for solo Pat: Song for the Stray Cat on the Fence, Time Worth Living (The Tension) and For the Sake of the Ashes (The Darkness).
Also, on a slightly different note, I really like Wingnut Dishwashers Union’s cover of Miranda Lambart’s Gunpowder and Lead.

Two other worthwhile books are Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays, which has a lot of great essays including the classic Anarchism: What It Really Stands For and Francisco Ferrer and The Modern School, about a Spanish anarchist teacher and his ideas, and Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, which I won’t summarise again but will suggest that you preface it by reading, or at least being familiar with the gist of, the story of Don Juan, Dostoevsky’s Demons and The Brothers Karamazov and some Kafka, or else roughly two thirds of the book won’t mean a lot to you.