Climategate

The media now speaks of “climategate,” one of many such “gates” inserted in headlines since the historic 1972 burglary of the Democrat national office in Washington’s Watergate Hotel.

But this “gate” so far has little resemblance to the original. Sensing that the Cuban counter-revolutionaries caught red-handed at Watergate were not just petty thieves, a team of reporters from the Washington Post “followed the money” to those who hired them--in the White House. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman dramatically portrayed Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in the 1974 film, All the President’s Men. They proved Nixon was indeed a crook.

However, those waxing indignant about “climategate” have shown no interest in identifying the criminals, much less following the money behind creating this “scandal” on the eve of the Copenhagen Summit and the opening of debate on climate legislation in the Senate. Instead all the focus has been on the victims of the crime, portraying them as perpetrators of “climate fraud.” And, since they were among the many scientists from around the world contributing to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, politicians with a definite money trail to Big Oil and Big Coal are saying the whole notion of anthropogenic (human caused) global warming must now be recognized as a hoax.

Congress is holding hearings. The UN has pledged to look in to the charges of fraud. Some have demanded Al Gore return the Oscar awarded for his film An Inconvenient Truth, since it was based on lies.

John Holdren, President Obama's science adviser, put things in the proper perspective when he told congress,

“These kinds of controversies and even accusations of bias and improper manipulation are not all that uncommon in science. The strength of science is that these kinds of controversies get sorted out over time by the process of peer review and continued critical scrutiny by the knowledgeable community.”

Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was more blunt in congressional testimony,

“The e-mails do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus . . . that tells us the Earth is warming, that warming is largely a result of human activity. Climate change is not just a theory, it is a documented set of facts.”

James McCarthy, chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, agreed in a letter to Senator Boxer of California,

“The body of evidence that human activity is a prominent agent in global warming is overwhelming.”

Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown uttered a rare sensible sound bite,

“With only days to go before Copenhagen, we mustn't be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics.”

But, instead of standing in solidarity with those under vicious attack, the academic employers of at least two of these scientists–East Anglia in Britain and Penn State--have pressured them to take a leave pending “investigation.” This gives credibility to the witch hunt charges that their whole body of work is suspect.

In the most serious challenge for humanity to date appeasement of those destroying our biosphere should not be on the agenda. By all means work for integrity in science. But we can live with human failings of individual scientists. Our grandchildren won’t be able to live as humans currently do with a six degree centigrade rise in the Earth’s temperature.

Bill Onasch

Easter and the Irish

Most Christians observe Easter today. (Some follow the Orthodox calendar and will mark it later.) For Roman Catholics it’s the most important event on their spiritual calendar. That’s certainly true for the Catholic majority in Ireland.

But for all faiths and nonbelievers on the Emerald Isle Easter is also always associated, whether celebrated or cursed, with a secular event–the Easter Rising of 1916. The long simmering resistance to centuries of English oppression boiled over in response to rumors of imminent conscription of Irish to fight England’s war in Europe.

Many working class leaders of the day understood the struggle they launched combined three objectives: keep Ireland out of the carnage of the First World War; independence from British rule; and establishment of a workers republic.

On our weekend news page we posted a photo showing a mobilization of the Irish Citizen Army outside Liberty Hall beneath a banner reading, “We Serve Neither King Nor Kaiser But Ireland.” Initially formed as a worker militia in response to brutal police attacks that killed and injured many trade unionists during the during the Lockout of 1913 in Dublin, the ICA was made up of trade unionists and socialists led by the remarkable James Connolly. They fought the British in 1916 in collaboration with other nationalists who were not so committed to their socialist goals.

After the rebels occupied key government buildings in Dublin, the British quickly reinforced their garrison and even sent Royal Navy warships to bombard coastal targets. There was intense fighting for about a week before the English prevailed. The British forces sustained 116 dead, 368 wounded and 9 missing. The Irish suffered 318 dead and 2,217 wounded. 3,430 men and 79 women were arrested. The top leaders of the Rising, including Connolly, were summarily executed.

Eventually the British, in stages, granted 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties independence. To this day they maintain rule in the other six. While all politicians in the 26 counties tip their hats to the Rising, and even Connolly, they have prided themselves in recent years for integrating the Irish economy–dubbed the Celtic Tiger–in to globalization. Like their counterparts in the USA, most Irish unions have been dedicated to “social partnership” agreements with the bosses. American corporations have been an important part of their “economic miracle.”

In occupied Ireland the traditional republicans of Sinn Féin have now embraced “power sharing” with the parties of anti-Catholic bigots loyal to the English crown–and multinational corporations. Instead of the workers republic Sinn Féin today speaks of an “Ireland of equals”–not unlike Britain’s “new” Labor Party’s repudiation of their long standing commitment to socialism.

Today the Celtic Tiger has been mortally wounded by financial collapse and waves of plant closures. The Irish republic is on the verge of bankruptcy. The crisis has spread in to the occupied six counties as well.

But the memory of class struggle has never been completely extinguished among Irish workers. While U.S. labor leaders cling to partnership on our sinking ship, we’ve seen an upsurge of plant occupations in Ireland, such as Waterford Crystal and Ford’s Visteon plant in occupied Belfast.

Just as American workers must rescue the real heritage of Debs from those who have sought to turn him in to a harmless icon, the Irish workers will find guidance from the views of Connolly the living fighter, not the ceremonial martyr.

That’s my Easter homily.

Scribes, Profs Fear Government Control Of Auto

David E Sanger, one time Tokyo bureau chief before becoming the current White House correspondent for the New York Times, is well educated and well traveled. A graduate of Harvard, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group and has a reputation as an expert on globalization. The very concept of the auto bailout makes him nervous and he tells us why in a December 8 article, Washington Takes Risks With Its Auto Bailout Plans.

Sanger begins by quoting remarks by President-designate Obama on Meet the Press,

“We don’t want government to run companies. Generally, government historically hasn’t done that very well.”

Obama is also a Harvard grad so maybe this is what is taught by the history and economics departments at that great Ivy League institution–whose endowment has lost eight billion dollars in investments over the past few months.

But the one experience of government controlling the auto industry–from 1942-46–was not so bad at all. It was, in fact, the greatest industrial mobilization the world has yet seen. Without its success there’s a good chance our first language today would not be English.

Of course, government control of that period was not limited to auto–who stopped producing cars to make planes, tanks, and jeeps. Virtually every sector of the economy was subject to government direction, supplemented by wage and price controls and rationing.

This omnipotent government intervention not only was indispensable for the U.S. military victory in World War II. It was also what finally put an end to the Great Depression that plagued the USA for more than a decade–including all through the mythical New Deal.

The next President, along with a top writer for America’s “paper of record,” do us a disservice by suppressing a significant part of our history clearly relevant to today’s economic crisis.

Of course, the productive success of the war time mobilization carried its own drawbacks–demand was created by the killing of seventy million persons and the destruction of most of the world’s industry outside North America. Taxpayers rewarded the owners of American industry with obscene profits while worker wages remained essentially frozen throughout the war. In those respects, not an experience we want to repeat. We’ll come back to that.

Despite Obama’s bad mouthing government control, Sanger still worries about bipartisan demands for “oversight” of the Big Three automakers,

“It all sounds perilously close to a word that no one in Mr. Obama’s camp wants to be caught uttering: nationalization.”

To Sanger this is like sounding the alarm about termites found on the front porch.

“The fact that there is so little protest in the air now ... reflects the desperation of the moment. But it is a strategy fraught with risks.”

The first is a reiteration of Obama’s quoted message,

“Government’s record as a corporate manager is miserable, which is why the world has been on a three-decade-long privatization kick, turning national railroads, national airlines and national defense industries into private companies.”

These examples are curious choices for advertising the superiority of private capital. Britain’s denationalized railroads stagger from one scandal to another concerning both safety and performance. And you would think the well traveled Sanger would have noticed by now that the world’s deregulated airlines have become dysfunctional.

“The second risk,” he continues, “ is that if the effort fails, and the American car companies collapse or are auctioned off in pieces to foreign competitors, taxpayers may lose the billions about to be spent.”

Sanger joins those in congress who swallowed an eight trillion dollar camel to salvage finance capital but now strain on a 15 billion dollar gnat for a loan to the Big Three.

Now he could raise some serious arguments against the Detroit bailout. For example, he could point out that General Motors has more operations abroad than in the USA and that they are making hefty profits in these other markets. They could easily save themselves from collapse at “home” with some of their earnings from other lands. But such an argument would cut across the grain of globalization that Sanger champions.

There’s more,

“And the third risk — one barely discussed so far — is that in trying to save the nation’s carmakers, the United States is violating at least the spirit of what it has preached around the world for two decades. The United States has demanded that nations treat American companies on their soil the same way they treat their home-grown industries, a concept called ‘national treatment.’”

He quotes Jeffrey Garten, a professor at the Yale School of Management, who as under secretary of commerce under Clinton was one of many government officials who “tried in vain to get Detroit prepared for a world of international competition,”

“If Japan was doing this, we’d be threatening billions of dollars in retaliation. In fact, when they did something a lot more subtle, we threatened exactly that.”

The fact that Sanger and Garten find this hypocritical double standard as shocking as discovering gambling at Rick’s, and express surprise at muted condemnation of it, demonstrates their understanding of globalization is ideological, not analytical.

Globalization, if it means anything, is a description of the way the leading powers–the old G-7--have screwed the workers of the whole world. It means breaking down social safety nets; abrogating labor, antitrust, and environmental laws; and privatizing every public treasure that might become a profit center; in order for capital to move freely across borders and exploit with few restrictions. It has profoundly, often disastrously, changed the industrial, financial, mercantile, and agricultural economies of the so called “developing countries” while at the same time putting workers in the imperial countries in what another NYT writer, Steven Greenhouse, so accurately described as a Big Squeeze.

But globalization has not eliminated national ruling classes, or the state power they control. Nor has it ended competitive tensions. In the nuclear age it is not practical to resolve disputes in the time honored way of war between major powers. Through passive consensus, all the major players defer to the super-power–the USA--as the ultimate arbiter. That’s why few will complain out loud if Washington decides to protect the Big Three. Welcome to the NFL.

Turning once more to his roots for another nervous Nellie, Sanger quotes Malcolm S. Salter, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School who has studied the auto industry for two decades and, until a few years ago, was an adviser to General Motors and Ford,

“...we’re in uncharted water. Think about this: Who in the federal government would have the tremendous insight needed to fix this industry?”

When the Feds took control of industry in World War II they turned to some bright young lads barely out of college to plan the economy. They were initially resented at the time by many corporate managers and some professors as snotty nosed kids. But some of them later became prominent, such as Tex Thornton, who founded Litton Industries, and Robert McNamara, who went on to become president of Ford and, of course, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson. And all in all they did a pretty good job of “fixing” industry.

Sanger returns to Professor Garten for his grand finale,

“We’re at this moment in history, in which the Chinese are touting that their system is better than ours with their mix of capitalism and state control. And our response, it looks like, is to begin replicating what they’ve been doing.”

Now I would agree with the learned professor that the Chinese mix is not what we should seek. The workers and peasants of China still live under an oppressive one party regime but have lost the old guarantees of even a basic diet, much less the free healthcare and education, and full employment that once brought a measure of security. The rapid growth of Chinese manufacturing–much of it offshored for the U.S. market–has created a new layer of rich but even bigger layers of poor. And, of course, it has been accompanied by a deplorable workplace fatality rate, not to mention enormous environmental destruction. But the downside for Chinese workers–and our biosphere--can be primarily attributed to the global capital component of the “mixed” economy–precisely what Sanger and his academic buddies promote in opposition to government control.

The greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression has not shaken the faith of Sanger & Co. that only the unfettered capitalist market will ultimately resolve all problems. The sole alternative they see is a slippery slope to the world of the Chinese Communists.

Let’s return, as promised, to the historical example they try to ignore–the World War II experience. In my opinion, the war time economic mobilization was a great success for primarily two reasons:

●The inherent superiority of intelligent planning over the irrational chaos of the markets.

●The overwhelming majority of society supported the objectives of the government effort and pitched in enthusiastically to make it work.

Today, in addition to our economic challenges, we face a crisis even more serious than the threat of being conquered by other countries–global warming. It surely rates the same kind of emergency response as this country saw after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Building more cars would not help this crisis–the proliferation of cars is in fact a major part of the problem. But the industrial capacity and productive workforce of the auto industry can play an essential role in converting our economy to things we really urgently need: new energy sources, new transportation alternatives, reclaiming forests and wetlands, retrofitting buildings to green standards, etc. There’s plenty of work to save the planet, to keep us all busy.

Like in WWII, workers should be retained, and if necessary retrained, in this conversion without loss of pay or benefits. Union contracts should be maintained--and even extended to those not presently covered.

Unlike the Second World War, we should not reward the corporate polluters with cost-plus contracts but instead embrace the long verboten “N” word and launch a bold new public sector, beginning with the finance, energy, and transportation sectors–including auto.

With the question of job security resolved rebuilding a green economy could quickly win the same level of popular support as the earlier war effort.

Who could the government possibly turn to to fix these industries? How about scientists, environmentalists, elected worker representatives, working with the Tex Thorntons and Robert McNamaras of today’s young generation?

Such ideas will send cold shivers to Sanger and the Establishment he seeks to serve.

Me? I’m in a sweat about what our kid’s world will look like if we can't find a way to move in this direction–and soon.

December 11, 2008

More Mean Spirit At the KCATA

I should have known something was up when I got an announcement in the mail about a new dental plan being offered at Open Enrollment at the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority–where I was employed for fourteen years before taking an early retirement a few years ago. A cover letter said it was the second benefit mailing. I had not received a first but, after calling the HR department they did send me the mailing for retirees.

I was at first puzzled. The costs for all options for the coming year were considerably less than what I was currently paying. Then I finally noticed a line buried near the end,

“All retirees who are age 65 and/or eligible for Medicare Part B will no longer be eligible to participate in the KCATA provided insurance plan(s).”

I should explain that the ATU Local 1287 contract provides that the Authority will pay ninety percent of retiree health insurance until age 65. After that the ATA pays only the princely sum of 21.50 per month for reimbursement for Part B.

But there is a long standing practice of allowing Medicare retirees to continue carrying ATA group coverage if they pay the full cost of the plan. This is what I started doing last December, when I turned 65 and had to enroll in Medicare. I’ve been paying 835.17 every month this year for a “Retiree Over 65 + Spouse” Blue Cross HMO option.

That’s a hefty amount–especially considering my only regular income amounts to 900 a month (after Part B deduction) from Social Security. I chose this plan because my wife, Mary, is self-employed, about thirteen years away from Medicare, and would find it difficult to get a decent individual plan at any price. I’m far from the only retiree with a younger spouse, or dependent children at home, who has benefitted from the past practice of staying in the employer group.

ATA officials offer no explanation for this change other than it’s not guaranteed in contract language. Since they don’t save a penny by denying retirees the option to fully pay continued insurance it can only be understood as a mean-spirited sticking it to the retirees and their families.

The ATA bosses did not bother to inform the union in advance of this change. I’m pleased that Local 1287 president Willie Wilson is filing a grievance over this failure to negotiate over a such a major change in benefit practices.

Of course, the USA is the only industrialized country in the world where such health care issues exist. Everybody else has some form of universal coverage–and at a lot lower cost than we pay. Most European countries, along with Japan and Canada, enjoy longer life spans than we do.

There is legislation in congress to establish a “single-payer” health care system, similar to what works in Canada. Hundreds of unions have endorsed HR676. To learn more go to the web site maintained by the California Nurses Association--guaranteedhealthcare.org

Bill Onasch
ATU Local 1287 retiree

A Three Alarm Crisis

Certainly the term “crisis” is overworked. Sometimes this suits the interests of the ruling rich, as Naomi Klein has ably demonstrated in such works as The Shock Doctrine, The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism. There are many serious problems confronting the working class that are chronic, endemic to Free Enterprise, requiring systemic change.

But, while resisting panic from cynical wolf-criers, we need to recognize that there are at times crisis situations that demand urgent action. I believe we can identify three of those today:

* Financial/Credit
The housing bubble, which created artificial, unsustainable high real estate values, is only part of the larger credit disaster. Many now owe far more than they can ever repay–not just on mortgages but for their transportation, health care, and college education. The current bailout effort in the USA holds the very flow of money hostage to an enormous transfer of wealth from the tax-paying working class to pay the rich part of this uncollectible debt. Whether the bailout is approved, or in its absence day to day credit dries up, it’s a lose-lose situation for American workers.

* Fuel
Soaring costs and spot shortages of fuel have adversely impacted every sector of the world economy and there’s no end in sight.

* Climate
Above all, the global warming crisis, threatening the very existence of human life as we know it, is advancing much faster than even the most pessimistic recent projections. With melting polar and Greenland ice, and warming ocean temperatures, we will soon see rising sea levels threatening the homes of hundreds of millions. We are approaching the point of no return. Yet greenhouse emissions are still on the rise, massive offshore drilling and shale extraction will soon be authorized by Congress, and 28 new coal fired powerplants are under construction, with permits approved for 20 more, just in the USA. Even former Vice-President Al Gore has called on young people to use civil disobedience to stop the growth of destructive coal.

But Gore is the partial exception that proves the rule. The corporate and political Establishment has no acceptable solutions to any of these challenges. And, most of our union and mainstream environmental leaders defer to the Establishment. That makes them part of the problem, not the solution.

Initiatives from below are clearly needed to work both through existing organizations, such as our unions and environmental groups, and to draw in the unorganized in to ad hoc formations, to discuss a program and strategy for confronting this three-alarm crisis.

In my opinion, such discussion should be geared to planning a far-reaching emergency response. Earlier this week, in writing about the inadequate party platforms in the current Canadian election campaign, Ian Angus wrote,

“A government that really wanted to deal with climate change would declare a Climate Emergency. It would learn from the experience of World War II, when Ottawa forced through a radical transformation of the entire economy in a few months, with no lost jobs or pay cuts.”

Of course, this is also apropos to the USA, which had an even more impressive economic mobilization during that war--in fact what finally pulled the country out of the Great Depression. It’s an example that many of us have raised in the effort to unite labor and environmentalists in the U.S. In taking such bold steps on the climate crisis we would also take care of the other two as well.

But we can improve on the war time experiences. Instead of guaranteeing profits on top of costs for corporations we could and should nationalize the financial, energy, and transportation sectors–whose owners are responsible for the emergency. With the resources of public investments, we should bring labor, environmental, and scientific representatives in to the actual planning and management of those sectors.

We could bolster those public resources by ending the current wars, which serve only the interests of global capital, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, while we’re at it, pull the plug on the insane building of more nuclear weapons.

All of this emergency reorganization of the economy should follow the principle of Just Transition–guaranteeing worker living standards as they are retrained and placed in different jobs in a green, peaceful economy.

I don’t offer any blueprint for change. I propose opening discussion to formulate an action plan. A logical place to begin is among those already engaged in trying to transform the labor movement–such as the Labor Notes network and Center for Labor Renewal. Some left groups, such as Aaron Bass's excellent analysis of the financial crisis in Socialist Action, seem interested in a nonsectarian dialogue.

But I stress the goal should be an action plan. We could talk about problems until the cows come home. We won’t solve everything right away. But the planet is on fire, the economy is crumbling–and like it or not, we’re the First Responders.

Peter Camejo, 1939-2008

Peter Camejo, one of the most prominent left leaders to emerge from the Sixties radicalization in the USA, lost a second bout with lymphoma Saturday, September 13. He was 68.

Camejo was born in to a wealthy Venezuelan family. His mother, Elvia, who had family and friend ties in the USA, and was concerned about health care in Venezuela at the time, chose to have Peter in a hospital in the Bronx. As a result Camejo began life as a dual citizen of the USA and Venezuela. Peter spent his earliest days in Venezuela. When Elvia divorced his father, Daniel, when Peter was seven, he relocated with his mother to the U.S. where he resided the rest of his life.

Peter was an exceptional student in high school and achieved a perfect SAT score in math. He went on to attend the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology for three years. But soon interest in the civil rights movement, and later radical politics, began to distract him from academic pursuits.

He became involved in the newly formed Young Socialist Alliance, an independent formation that evolved in to the youth group of the Socialist Workers Party. I first met Peter in 1963, when he came to Chicago to speak for the YSA. He was already well on his way to becoming, in my opinion, the best agitational speaker our generation produced.

He put these speaking skills at work in many venues. He became a well-known student leader at UC Berkeley–where he was enrolled from 1965 to his expulsion, ordered by Governor Ronald Reagan, in 1967 for “unauthorized use of a microphone.” Reagan listed him as one of the “ten most dangerous Californians.” The only evidence cited for this remarkable assertion was that he was “present at all antiwar demonstrations.”

The height of Camejo’s speaking abilities was reached during his 1976 campaign as the SWP’s presidential candidate. He traveled 150,000 miles, speaking at dozens of campaign events. He even managed to get the last word in on William F Buckley’s television talk show. With no funds available for television or direct mail advertising, and only able to get on the ballot in eighteen states, Camejo racked up an impressive vote total of over 90,000.

Camejo also produced some serious writing, such as Racism, Revolution, Reaction, 1861-1877: The Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction; Liberalism, Ultraleftism or Mass Action; Who Killed Jim Crow: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement and It's Lessons for Today; and How to Make a Revolution in the United States.

Years later, after Peter applied his mathematical prowess as a stock broker, first with traditional Wall Street firms, later with his own enterprise, he wrote, The SRI Advantage: Why Socially Responsible Investing Has Outperformed Financially.

For reasons not clear to party members at the time, Camejo parted company from the central leadership of the SWP in 1980. He eventually became a leader in California’s Green Party, describing himself as a watermelon–green on the outside, red on the inside. He made three campaigns for Governor as a Green and in 2004 was Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential pick.

I certainly had my differences with parts of Peter’s evolution from socialist agitator to watermelon. But the contributions he made to building social movements and the socialist movement for decades are enduring and, to the end, he was still working to do the right thing. He will be missed. Our sympathy goes out to his family, friends, and comrades.

Bill Onasch

Celia Hart Santamaría (1962 – 2008)

Celia Hart, and her brother Abel, were killed in a car wreck in Havana on Sunday, September 7. Funeral arrangements were hurriedly made, racing against the approach of devastating hurricane Ike–which roughly followed the route taken by the victorious guerilla forces of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara marching to Havana a half-century ago.

Celia and Abel’s mother, Haydee Santamaria, had been part of those revolutionary forces, going back to her participation with Fidel in his earliest battle against Batista–the 1953 assault on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago. Her life ended in 1980.

Their father, Armando Hart, was one of the main organizers of the revolutionary movement in the cities. He was selected to be the revolutionary government’s first Minister of Education and later, from 1976-97 served as Minister of Culture. He continues to actively follow political events at the age of 78.

Celia did not initially choose to follow the highly political path of her prominent parents. Instead, she pursued a study of physics. She did her graduate work at the University of Dresden, becoming the first non-German female graduate from their prestigious physics school.

But the differences she saw between her native Cuba and the Stalinist dictatorship in East Germany deeply troubled her. She later wrote,

“In 1985 I returned to Cuba on holidays and confessed to my father my feelings of utter desperation. In response, my father opened a cupboard and got out four books: the three-volume Life of Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher and Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed. I devoured these books, but until a few months ago had no opportunity of reading the rest of Trotsky’s works.”

Celia, while remaining loyal to the Cuban revolution and regime, began writing and speaking extensively, independent of Communist Party venues. She was particularly interested in the working class upsurge in Latin America, especially Venezuela. She established relations with Trotsky’s grand-son, Esteban Volkov in Mexico and took part in introducing Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed at a book fair in Havana several years ago.

Some thought Celia was “asking for trouble” in advancing such views. My good friend Jeff Mackler, who is helping to edit and introduce a soon to be published collection of Celia’s articles and speeches, writes,

“Celia was proud to tell us that her defense of Trotskyist ideas had not gone unnoticed by the Fidel Castro she loved, admired and knew since her childhood. A letter from Fidel to Celia not long ago conveyed his appreciation of Celia's writings and concluded with the assertion that Celia was not to be discouraged from expressing her views. ‘No one will hurt a single hair on your beautiful head,’ said Fidel, a delighted Celia told us.”

More recently, she began to collaborate with socialists in North America. She, of course, was banned from visiting the USA and travel by Americans to Cuba is made extremely difficult by the U.S. government. I was fortunate to meet and spend some time with her at a conference in Toronto a few months ago.

I was already impressed by her fresh analytic application of classic socialist views in her writings. I was pleased to experience first hand her dynamic energy, sense of humor–and our shared passion for baseball. One could not long remain gloomy or lethargic in her presence.

Her tragic demise is a set back, for sure, for the working people of this hemisphere as well as a deeply felt personal loss for those who knew her. Our sympathy goes out to her father.

But Celia certainly would not want her friends and comrades to mope. She would expect us to carry on her efforts to liberate working people from exploitation and ignorance.

Bill Onasch