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For forums, classes and other activities, contact the Socialist Action 18 SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1992 Grace Carlson Dear editors, I commend you for running the news of Grace Carlson's death. [See the August 1992 issue of Socialist Action.] This news wasn't in The Militant [newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party—or, if it was, I missed it.

However, Grace Carlson wasn't the first woman to run for vice president. The first woman to run for vice president and have her name on the ballot of several states was Marie Brehm, the 1924 Prohibition Party candidate. Brehm received 56,292 votes, from 15 states. The Prohibition Party (which still exists) is very proud of having been the first party to nominate a woman for vice president.

Also, in 1884, the Equal Rights Party announced that it was running Belva Lockwood for president and Belle Boyd for vice president. However, this group didn't actually line up slates of presidential elector candidates, and thus wasn't credited with any votes.

Richard Winger, San Francisco, Calif.

Grace Carlson 2 Dear editors, The article about the life and death of Dr. Grace Carlson, the Socialist Workers Party vice presidential candidate in 1948, was excellent, but it contained one glaring error. I knew Grace quite well from 1934 to 1943, when I left Minneapolis. She was a dialectical materialist at that time, not a Catholic. I fact, I sent a woman who was a good Catholic, but wanted to join the Socialist Workers Party to talk with Grace, and Grace convinced the woman of the philosophy of dialectical materialism.

Grace herself returned to the Catholic Church in 1953. She always considered herself a socialist, however, and treated socialists with respect. But in the years she was active in the Socialist Workers Party, she was not a Catholic.

David Cooper, Montebello, Calif.

Choice!

Dear editors, The article on the Freedom of Choice Act in the August issue of Socialist Action explained the coopting of the women's movement by the Democratic Party. The pro-choice women's movement has been maneuvered into supporting the Democrats, once again, in the hope that those elected by women's votes will pass the Freedom of Choice Act some time "later."

The fact that the Democrats are callously and cynically using the pro-choice issue was not even sugar-coated in a recent article published in the San Francisco Chronicle. Democratic Party operatives stated that the pro-choice issue was doing so well (for them, the Democrats) that there really was no reason to pass the Freedom of Choice Act this year.

In other words, it doesn't matter how many more teenage Becky Bells or poverty-ridden Rosie Jimenezes die because of restrictive abortion laws between now and election day. All that matters is that American women believe in the deception that the Democratic Party candidates can be counted on to defend abortion rights in the "future."

The objective of the Freedom of Choice Act, from the point of view of the Democrats, was never to defend abortion rights; it was only to win votes in a year when more workers than ever before are becoming convinced that neither party can be counted on to defend our interests.

Kathy Setian, San Francisco, Calif.

Two Nations Dear editors, Your August issue was good, as usual. I particularly liked Joseph Ryan's review of Andrew Hacker's "Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, and Unequal." By coincidence, the book was published only two month before the great Los Angeles revolt-the nation's first multi-ethnic urban revolt.

Hacker pointed out that from the West India trade of the Northeastern colonies of America to the cotton exports that helped pay for northern industrialization, America's economy depended largely on slave labor. However, he did fail to make clear that everything was based upon land stolen from the Native Americans, most of whom were murdered.

It's easy to forget the past when the present has so many problems. In a nutshell: Capitalism is no longer working. Even apart form the current depression, the American economy has stagnated. For the past 10 years, the capitalists have failed to invest in the ingredients of economic growth. Since 1980, the United States has spent a smaller share of its income on net new investment than at any other time since World War II.

We are not likely to ever have an economic boom as we did at the close of World War II. Our working class living standards will continue to decline steadily.

The working class works beneath the earth and above it, inside buildings and in the rain and snow, with the spade, the crowbar, and the computer. We are laying the foundations for some new, monstrous civilization to be controlled and owned by useless capitalists.

When we think of all this, we can realize what crimes were committed to build the ancient civilizations. The seven wonders of the world—the Egyptian pyramids, the Hanging Gardens, the great temples, the Greek statues-what hideous crimes gave them birth!

Plato lied. The created things of this world are not a reflection of the ideal, but products of human sweat, blood, hard labor, and lives. It is we who built the pyramids, cut the marble for the temples and statues, pulled the oars in the galleys, and died in the wars-while they wrote poems and dramas and rationalized their crimes by appeals to God.

There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.

If the world's wealthy power elite doesn't destroy the earth's forests and oceans, they will use us to erect huge monuments to them—soaring buildings, highways, and factories. But our hands will carry every brick. And we shall be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the jurists, the philosophers, the poets, the priests. Our masters will produce their own beauty, virtue, and truth.

All this will happen unless we fight the scourge of the earth, those responsible for its destruction, the small criminal ruling class of hopelessly inept selfish people who have created a monstrous Frankenstein system they can no longer control.

What is the answer? I think it is in Nat Weinstein's booklet, "Socialist Action: Who We Are, What We Stand For," which ends with these words: "Socialism is the only road leading away from poverty, inflation, unemployment, imperialist war, totalitarianism—all the worldwide scourges of decaying capitalism. Socialism can save humanity from capitalist barbarism and open up a new world for all peoples...

Victor Saxe, Oakland, Calif.

USSR today

Dear editors, It's difficult to get real information about Russia from American newspapers. Self-congratulatory paens to the victory of capitalism leave out important details. In May and June, I spent a month in Russia, and I found the situation a little different than reported.

The "free market" is not working. The hundreds of sellers behind the Bolshoi Theater are not incipient capitalists developing Milton Friedman's ideas, but impoverished workers and pensioners selling their last possessions. It would take Pangloss himself to imagine an elderly woman selling one sweater as some sort of vindication of capitalism.

Possibly Arbat Street in Moscow is a better example of capitalism: Some years ago, it was a political and cultural street, where poets stood and read poems and artist sold their paintings. Now it has become a tourist trap where tourists can buy stolen religious icons, Russian army hats, and wooden painted eggs. And the criminal gangs take a percentage from each seller.

Kiosks sell off-brand French perfumes, Russian brandy with French labels, cardboard containers of fruit juices with expired dates on them. All the over-production and junk of Europe is thrown at unsuspecting Russian consumers.

The expected wave of foreign investment has not taken place. Instead of $19 billion from the IMF, maybe 1 billion is contemplated. Of course, Americans build hotels. The new Radisson in Moscow is straight out of Beverly Hills, though there is not a single Russian who can afford to pay $200 a night.

Foreign hustlers, aka "investors," with little or no capital themselves, are wheeling and dealing in the bars of hotels to get the bargains while they're hot. Russian lumber is a hot commodity, and the forests face a new ecological onslaught.

The Yeltsin Plan is to privatize major industry, with workers getting 25 percent of non-voting stock. (Obviously, to shut them up.) At the same time, companies "losing money" will go bankrupt and close down. So workers will be given stock in many companies that will be closing down.

And the lucky workers will have pretty stock certificates to burn. Millions of workers will face unemployment, thanks to the ideas of Milton Friedman and Jeffrey Sachs, who succeeded in ruining the economies of Bolivia and Poland previously.

In the middle of September, A Congress to form a Party of Labor is taking place in Moscow. Professor A. Buzgalin and Boris Kagarlitsky tend toward left social-democratic positions, advocating a "mixed" economy together with Yugoslavian forms of "workers control." They will form the basis of this new party together with the old bureaucracy of the Moscow Federation of Unions.

However, most Russian workers do not identify with the old official trade unions. On May 1, the Moscow Trade Union Federation was able to mobilize only some 5000 workers to its rally.

The official unions still have enormous resources, which now face expropriation by the Yeltsin regime. Kagarlitsky expressed his concern to this writer that the Moscow Federation may be interested in the new Party of Labor only as a legal maneuver to protect its property from expropriation. The "independent" unions that split off from the "official" unions have been largely subordinated to the AFL-CIO and therefore spout the Yeltsin line.

Thus, a Baltlmore P.O. Box 16005 Baltimore, MD 21218 Boston P.O. Box 1046 GMF Boston, MA 02205 (617) 497-0230 Chicago P.O. Box 578428 Chicago, IL 60657 (312) 327-5752 Cincinnati P.O. Box 20109 Cincinnati, OH 45220 (513) 751-1597 question Clovoland P.O. Box 6151 Cleveland, OH 44101 (216) 429-2167 Dotrolt P.O. Box 1613 Detroit, MI 48231 Los Angolos P.O. Box 862014 Los Angeles, CA 9008 (213) 660-2891 branch in your area!

Forinformation about

other areas, contact the national office of Socialist Action at (415) 821-0458. the entire Russian left is whether to work within the existing unions or to build new unions. I attended a meeting of teachers who wanted to form a new union. They represented only 42 schools, while there are more than a thousand schools in Moscow alone.

Teachers' wages have declined with inflation, so that the average teacher earns only $8 to $10 a month, equivalent in rubles. A similar process has happened to medical workers. By underfunding the salaries of workers in basic services, Yeltsin is gradually forcing privatization as workers abandon the schools and hospitals to look for better paying jobs.

Russia is beginning to look more and more like a Third World country, a source of raw materials and cheap labor. The average Russian worker is aware he lives worse under the new "free market" capitalism than he did 10 or 20 years ago. While there is enormous confusion, there also remains a tradition of equality that dates from the Russian Revolution.

Earl Gilman, la nyumancaN KDAnEAd Viewpoint A biweekly magazine published under the auspices of the Fourth International One year subscription:

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SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1992 19 "Cabeza de Vaca," a film directed by Nicolás Echevarría; written by Echevarrla and Guillermo Sheridan;

based on the l6th-century journals of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. In Spanish with English sub-titles.

The half-century following Columbus's first voyage to America was the Age of the Conquistadors. These military zealots and adventurers, spawned from the Catholic Counter Reformation and the wars against the Moors, are known today for their ruthlessness against the Native American population.

But the conquistador who is probably least known among his fellows, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, was the most humanitarian of their number. He learned to Look upon the Indians not only with compassion, but with respect.

Cabeza de Vaca actually lived among the Indians. In FILM REVIEW 1S27, he embarked on a voyage from Havana, Cuba, to the "island" of Florida, in order to help establish a colony and to hunt for gold. After being shipwrecked near Tampa Bay, he wandered across the continent for eight years—from Florida to Mexico. Along the way, he received food and shelter from a number of Indian nations, and in turn was revered by them as a healer and a magician.

This story, told by Cabeza de Vaca in his "Relación"

of 1542, has now been brought to the screen. The film "Cabeza de Vaca" is disjointed and somewhat confusing-and yet often spectacularly beautiful. Produced in Mexico just in time for the Columbus Quincentennial celebrations, it will no doubt help to dispel the idea that the Spanish brought a "superior" culture to the New World.

Director Nicolás Echevarría depicts early America with the sense of wonderment that the early Spanish explorers must have had when they first beheld it. In one culture, people clad only in blue, green, and white body paint scurry across the sand like lizards. Another people, decked out like ancient Egyptians, lay out their dead to be torched. And another people work their magic in a Gauguin-like village in a mangrove swamp.

Some of the Indians in the film seem, as Columbus himself reported, "so naive and so free with their posPolice" force and implemented a new "Unified System of Vigilance," involving joint activity by the army, the ministry of the interior, police, and the long-standing neighborhood block defense committees.

A second concern about tourism is that while it generates hard currency, tourism does nothing to increase the productive capacity of the economy or the labor force. The Cuban leadership is looking to broader joint ventures to fulfill that role, but most joint ventures to date have been for the construction of tourist facilities.

Improvisation based on reality • In hopes of attracting more diverse investments, the Cuban government has recently authorized foreign capital to have majority control (i.e. more than 50 percent) of new ventures and to impose standard capitalist labor discipline and management practices in these enterprises.

Achieving agricultural self-sufficiency in a fertile tropical country with three or four growing seasons should be manageable, assuming the necessary energy, seeds, fertilizers, equipment, etc., can be secured and paid for. It will likely mean a permanent change of diet for many Cubans, which may not be particularly welcome to some.

Cuba has invested a lot of resources into the development of commercially competitive biotechnology, such as vaccines, and has cornered the market for some of these. Whether Cuba will be able to "maintain its market share" over the long run, I really don't know enough to say.

What existed until two years ago was a single-party state, but with a qualitatively different (better) single party and much greater popular participation than the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. However, revolutionary Cuban political culture has been been marked for 30 years by a siege mentality that has had to varying degrees, depending on the historical moment, a "chill effect" on selected political rights.

The reason for this siege mentality has been the real siege so relentlessly pursued by the U.S. government and so studiously ignored or trivialized by the U.S. media.

This siege has included a full scale invasion; a naval blockade; more than two dozen assassination attempts; a hermetically-maintained economic embargo and large-scale sabotage; introduction of bacteriological viruses directed against plants, animals and people; all kinds of CIA paramilitary and covert operations; the largest U.S. destabilization operations ever mounted; and a massive disinformation campaign aimed primarily at the U.S. public.

The mentality required by a small island to resist the siege of the most powerful country in the world just 90 miles away has been expressed in the slogan: "Within the Revolution-everything; outside the Revolution—nothing."

Naturally, those rightly or wrongly defined to be "outside the revolution" have reason to feel that Cuba has been something less than an open society.

Broaden mass participation

Another aspect of the leadership's response, however, has been efforts to broaden the popular voice in decision-making. The preparatory discussions for the fourth congress of the Communist Party held last October involved tens of thousands of non-party Cubans and touched on everything under the sun, although the actual congress results have gotten mixed reviews.

Additionally, a genuine effort is underway to give government institutions, as opposed to party units, the decisive say in addressing and resolving local problems.

Politically, the "average" Cubans that I spoke to were in one of two general camps.

The first camp consists of people who are not particularly political, who are overwhelmed by the current crisis, and sessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone."

The film also depicts the respect given to women and the relatively uninhibited sexual relations of the Native American cultures. The Spaniards looked at this with amazement—as well as embarrassment. Bartolomé de las Casas, the 16th-century chronicler, wrote: "Marriage laws are non-existent; men and women alike choose their mates and leave them as they please-without who simply "change."

Others are politically minded, but are in opposition to the government and definitively want a "change of government."

People in this camp are the ones who are stealing the planes and boats (because of the U.S. refusal to issue visas) to arrive as heroes in Miami, and are often the sole subjects of journalistic portraits of the "real" Cuba.

Overall, this camp is not an insignificant group of people and will undoubtedly grow larger as long as the economic crisis deepens.

The other camp are Cubans who may not complain any less than the first camp, but who are committed to doing whatever is required for Cuba's survival, to carry on with the revolutionary project's goals and ideals, and to making good on all the sacrifices that have been made in the last 33 years. They, too, want changes, but changes within the Cuban concept of socialism.

More than once I had people describe to me in great detail the current difficulties of their lives only to conclude with something along the lines of "Well, what do you expect when you are the only country in the world that won't take orders from Washington, that believes in justice and solidarity, and we're a small, poor island to boot."

Which of these camps is the majority?

What do "most" Cubans "really" think?

On such questions, I declare myself incompetent to make any scientific, definitive judgement. In such a short visit, even talking to as many as 100 people, I really wouldn't presume to know how Cubans would "really vote" on the Revolution and its leadership. However, strictiy as a personal opinion based on what I heard and saw, I believe the pro-revolution camp to be bigger, more determined and active, and of greater social weight.

Hands Off Cuba!

I cannot emphasize enough our responsibility, our obligation to demand that the U.S. government lift the economic embarwant out or some undefined offense, jealousy, or anger. ... If [the women] tire of their men, they give themselves abortions with herbs that force stillbirths, covering their shameful parts with leaves or cotton cloth; although on the whole, Indian men and women look upon total nakedness with as much casualness as we look upon a man's head or his hands."

But Echevarría refuses to idealize the native peoples in his film. Some of them are warlike-even torturing and enslaving their captives.

Echevarría chooses to concentrate on some of the more fantastical episodes of the Cabeza de Vaca legend. Thus, we see the explorer seemingly raise an Indian woman from the dead. The real Cabeza de Vaca, however, was careful to disengage himself from any charges of having had links with sorcery. In his "Relación," Cabeza de Vaca ascribed his "cures" to the power of Christian prayer.

Cabeza de Vaca believed that the best way to win the Indians to Christianity and the Spanish Crown was to treat them fairly. He wrote in his journal of the grief he felt when he witnessed Spanish soldiers making slaves out of the Indians who had befriended him. "We set about to preserve the liberty of the Indians and thought we had secured it," he complained, "but the Christians had arranged to go and spring upon those we had sent away in peace and confidence."

There is little doubt that Cabeza de Vaca felt some remorse about the role that he himself had played, as a conquistador, in enslaving and destroying the native cultures. Unfortunately, the film does not take full advantage of the opportunity to explore the self-blame that must have been raging inside the man.

Many of the episodes are poorly explained and motivated. The basic "who, where, and when" of the narrative is muddled. Echevarría works best not as a story-teller, but as a painter in filmic images. In that way, the picture of colonial exploitation is displayed brilliantly.

This can be seen in the final shot: A hundred Indian slaves are huddled like ants beneath a gigantic cross of silver. They are carrying it across the desert to be raised above the new cathedral. The slaves are alone except for a single Spanish soldier, who beats a measured time on his drum.

go, normalize diplomatic and immigration relations, end the sabotage and covert operations, remove the military base at Guantanamo, and respect Cuba's rights as a sovereign nation.

We have this responsibility to ourselves as well, because what kind of people are we if we sit with folded arms while "our" government attempts to grind yet another people, another country into dust? What measure of equality, justice, and solidarity will we ever achieve here if the efforts to achieve those goals in Cuba are crushed underfoot?

A great many Cubans, I believe the majority, are hanging in against formidable obstacles not only to protect what they and their revolution have already achieved, but also to go forward, as best they can, toward creating a society where human needs and human beings come first.

The spirit of these Cubans I think is expressed in a message Fidel Castro sent to solidarity rallies in New York and San Francisco in early February. He wrote: "We are not preparing for an apocalypse, but we are ready for everything, and we will make every sacrifice necessary precisely because we are convinced that the future belongs to us and that right is on our side. Only those who resist win, those who do not weaken when faced with difficulties, those who have confidence in their ideals and in the moral and revolutionary reserves of their people. "We Cubans are not and will not be alone in this extraordinary hour. Nobody should feel pity or be sorry for us. One can feel sorrow for traitors and weaklings, but not for a people writing some of the most heroic and honorable pages of its history. What Cuba needs now, above all, is understanding and respect. You give us much more than that when you do not hesitate to express your solidarity with the Cuban people in this crucial moment. "What is at stake at this very instant in our land is not only the future of our country, but also to a great extent the future of justice, of socialism and of the poor peoples of the world."

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