Members of DSA went to Cuba and met with Dissidents (and declined to meet with the President)
Members of DSA went to Cuba and met with Dissidents (and declined to meet with the President)
Late last year, the International Committee organized a DSA delegation to Cuba consisting of members of our national leadership and rank-and-file DSA members. The delegation to Cuba came in the context of a particularly harsh period of repression by the United States. Cuba was placed back on the US ...
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.
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The more I read stuff like this plus the history of real movements I realize why things like DemCent [emphasis added] and other hardline ML things are needed but that’s not a discussion for here
The article itself essentially makes that claim, just in coded language:
These shortcomings are all symptoms of underdevelopment in DSA’s diplomatic work, stemming from a lack of structure, standards, and norms [emphasis added] about how members should conduct themselves when representing the organization to foreign parties and governments, especially those much more developed in their practice of socialism than us.
In an effort to have a generative political conflict out of this situation, and to encourage positive change in how we engage in member-driven diplomatic work, we propose the following guidelines for structuring delegations and the work that follows them in the future as a way to maximize these principles and ensure that our delegations are beneficial for delegates and DSA alike.
Then proceeds to list four things that would be common sense to any "DemCent" organization.
Red Star Caucus practices democratic centralism within their DSA caucus lol
Why do they even bother with the DSA then
Lots of resources, good budget, does a ton of stuff that is really good (like actually connecting with the local community and helping them) but PSL doesn't, in way more cities and lots of more members than other parties
lol, but wouldn't that be grounds for DSA to kick them out? IIRC, the DSA's bylaws forbid anyone that is "operating under the direction of a democratic centralist organization" or something like that.
It's almost impossible to be kicked out of DSA, whether it's being too right wing or left wing
That is terrible. No wonder it's filled with anti-communists.