February 20, 2024
Our friends at Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal have posted an excerpt from the new MR Press book Race in Cuba: Essays on the Revolution and Racial Inequality by Esteban Morales Domínguez. Read the first chapter, “Challenges of the Racial Question in Cuba.”
February 20, 2024
Nothing makes me more hopeful than discovering another human being to admire. My wonder at the life of Celia Sánchez, a revolutionary Cuban woman virtually unknown to Americans, has left me almost speechless. In hindsight, loving and admiring her was bound to happen, once I knew her story. Like Frida Kahlo, Zora Neale Hurston, Rosa Luxemburg, Agnes Smedley, Fannie Lou Hamer, Josephine Baker, Harriet Tubman, or Aung San Suu Kyi, Celia Sánchez was that extraordinary expression of life that can, every so often, give humanity a very good name.
February 20, 2024
Join Fred Magdoff for a discussion of “The Environmental Crisis and Capitalism” on March 11 at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and a discussion of “Depletion of the World’s Resources” on April 8 in Troy, New York. Fred, a frequent contributor to Monthly Review and MR Press author, is professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont. He is author of numerous articles and books on agriculture, world food problems, and the environment. He is coauthor with John Bellamy Foster of What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism.
February 20, 2024
Jeb Sprague is the author of Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, published by Monthly Review Press. This article was printed in ¡Presente!, the newspaper of the movement to close the School of the Americas.
February 20, 2024
In The Unlikely Secret Agent, Ronnie Kasrils, who served as South Africa’s minister for intelligence services, remembers his late wife and the remarkable life she lived. He paints his portrait with the honesty of a good biographer but always with the bittersweet memory of a great love lost. “It is a huge testament to her inner strength and will,” he writes, “that she remained staunch and true to her principles and commitment through the decades.” And it’s a testament to his that he was able to sculpt his recollections into such a poignant and beautiful book.
February 20, 2024
(From the Havana Times) HT: What do you think of racism in Cuba? Does it exist? How can it be combated? Aren’t the current socio-economic changes encouraging racist attitudes, which certainly don’t contribute to greater equality between people? . . . EM: Certainly there are changes that don’t contribute to greater equality, but there’s no choice other than to implement them. We had an egalitarian system, but it threatened all of our equilibrium. It would be worse to repeat that kind of egalitarianism, it is not even possible to defend it. There will be people who within a yet unknown period of time will have to suffer so that in the end we’re all saved. That is a price we have to pay for the mistakes that we acknowledge were committed. Within this, we need to seek policies so that the suffering is minimized – but we can’t prevent it entirely.
February 20, 2024
Nancy Stout is the author of One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution, published by Monthly Review Press. She was interviewed by our friends at New York University Press about the making of her book, doing research in Cuba, Celia’s life and relationship with Fidel Castro, and more!
February 20, 2024
I can’t recall if Walter came before or after the demonstrations, but he certainly participated in the discussion that followed after the 1966 expulsion and after the Arusha Declaration. After the Declaration, in ’67, ’68, there was a small group of people called the Socialist Club in which Malawians, Ugandans, Ethiopians, and many other students were involved. The Socialist Club was transformed into the University Students African Revolutionary Front (USARF). It was all the initiative of students, not the faculty. Walter was one of the few young faculty involved, but purely within a relationship of equality. There was no professor and student there.
February 20, 2024
Jeb Sprague’s definitive Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti (Monthly Review Press, 2012) is the product of seven years of research and writing. Since the 2004 Bush Administration-backed overthrow of the democratically-elected Jean Bertrand Aristide government, journalist and scholar Sprague has been investigating key players behind that coup. His work is especially strong on interviews with figures in anti-Aristide political and paramilitary networks, and on unearthing cables from the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince and other relevant documents through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Sprague also combed through all the Haiti-related documents released through the activist project Wikileaks.
February 20, 2024
Join Ronnie Kasrils, author of The Unlikely Secret Agent, anti-apartheid leader, and international solidarity activist, for a talk and book signing at The Riverside Church in NYC on Oct 22.
