The entire article is very good and gives a solid reasoning (for baby leftists, not anyone here) of why we need to support Cuba. It also highlights the weakness of both the DSA and the DSA IC from within that allowed this to happen + the steps they need to take. Give it a read. (The more I read stuff like this plus the history of real movements I realize why things like DemCent and other hardline ML things are needed but that’s not a discussion for here).
I’m highlighting just the parts relevant to the title.
Multiple delegates chose to skip out on parts of the programming, including declining to meet with the president of Cuba, who held a frank conversation with the delegates who did attend for more than two hours.
Throughout the trip, members of the delegation from the Reform & Revolution Caucus (R&R) and the Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC) criticized the Cuban government both to our Cuban hosts and other DSA members, and skipped out on multiple delegation events. Most shamefully, both Maria (representing R&R) and Renée (representing SMC, and a member of the current NPC) skipped out on meeting with President Díaz-Canel, who spent more than 2 hours in a frank discussion specifically addressing the critiques these very same DSA members brought up to their Cuban hosts earlier on the trip. This means that the Cuban hosts were listening thoughtfully to the critiques and relayed them back to the President. That our Cuban comrades would care this deeply and thoroughly about our critiques is a sign that they honor us as equals and truly want to make ties with U.S. socialists, as relatively powerless as we are.
Maria in particular met with anti-government opposition groups while on delegation, which when taken together with the fact of her skipping the meeting with the comrade President suggests a goal of undermining the Cuban socialist state, not defending it against U.S. imperialism. Furthermore, R&R declined to follow what few guidelines the International Committee offered around discussion of the trip after returning. Delegates were instructed to keep news of the conversation with President Díaz-Canel private until an official reportback; R&R decided instead to discuss this at their caucus panel, pre-empting the official reportback.
What’s new? At the height of DSA’s popularity during the Sanders campaign, I checked out their website. I read their history, and they celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, thinking that it was their turn to lead lead their version of “democratic socialism” in the former eastern bloc countries. The fall of the USSR ushered in rightwing governments aligned with US imperialism in these countries, but these SocDems will keep aligning themselves with US interests hoping for the collapse of the remaining Socialist countries.
Stalin, once again, was correct.
To be fair to DSA it’s not just social democrats anymore. Tons of young people joined after Bernie just because he called himself a democratic socialist. That made DSA an incoherent space full of all sorts of self identified left wing activists. The old guard with their outdated anti communism quickly became the minority. Additionally the MLs that radicalized while in DSA were unsurprisingly the ones who actually figured out how to actually run the org. The general membership recognized that and voted a lot of them into leadership positions. They’re actually the ones who wrote this article.