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.
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.
Admire Canel's patience to put up with the kind of freak that takes the opportunity of going to Cuba to backseat actual socialists. Same energy as the Weather Underground being petitioned by the Viet Minh to build a broad movement and focus on bringing along the masses, but our audacious white saviours know better than that: we must build a perfect party of 14 people instead.
Lmao, why bother going to a country that you don’t support at all? You would think that Cuba is one of the litmus tests for leftists aside from palestine which i’m sure they fail on that part too.
The DSA doesn’t even ideologically alligned with global south countries, just go to a EU organized liberal socialist conferences in some nordic petrol-state instead. Or better, go to the Rosa Luxemberg center in Germany.
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.
For context, the two chauvinists were from a Trot contingent and a socdem contingent. They are behaving exactly as you'd expect them to, they have no idea how to do anything except tell other people what they should really be doing in order to be properly on the left. The SocDem contingent is the one that carried water for Bowman btw.
Imagine turning down the chance of meeting with the president of an AES country and still calling yourself a socialist. Fucking western leftists I swear.
if you're an Yankee going to latin America, especially a former American colony now under siege like Cuba, you need to sit down and shut up, your settler ass has absolutely no standing to criticize their affairs. And meeting with anti-government "dissidents"? Disgusting. Might as well be freelancing for the CIA. Yankee imperialists show an ounce of fucking humility challenge (impossible)
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.
Imagine having the chance to have a conversation with someone with the experience of Díaz-Canel and instead decline it to talk with some gusanos! Nah these fellas are feds.
calling your faction "reform and revolution" is such a funny way to set yourself up as a failure ahead of time. DSA having no real party line or mechanisms for discipline makes the whole org weaker.
It always feels like someone hopped in a time-portal when I see them shitting on Cuba. That attitudes was going out of style in the 90s, for Christsakes.
It's stuff like this that makes me want to make my own org, not even to actually overthrow capitalism in my country, but just to go on trips to AES and get to chat with their leadership. These guys had the opportunity of a lifetime and they were too smug and chauvinist to even consider it.
If they just wanted to talk to some feds they could just use a social media platform and avoid the hassle of going to Cuba, or just go to Langley Virginia.
Just to put into focus... literally nobody's opinions matter about this crap as randos on the internet. Yes the behavior was beyond the pale but you aren't doing anything about it by yelling at strangers on the internet. If the Cubans made it clear they were offended by the behavior I could understand more of the "sky is falling" reactions but yeah. I have seen no indications of that and the trip was overall reported as a success. I will not be responding to any comments.