Politics is Not a Career: Screening Cuba After Castro with Abby Martin
As Cuba suffers blackouts and deprivation resulting from a brutal blockade, and the world waits to see if Trump and Rubio follow through on their threats of military action, anti-imperialists are organizing in solidarity.
Portland DSA, PSL Portland, and Portland Action for Cuba organized a screening of the film Cuba After Castro on August 10. Co-director Abby Martin, whose previous work includes the documentary features Gaza Fights for Freedom and Earth’s Greatest Enemy as well as The Empire Files, sat down with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel for an exclusive interview. The film combines this conversation with archival footage to create a compelling examination of how the Cuban people are confronting the latest in a long series of attempts by the United States to destroy their revolution.
21st Century Socialism Caucus’ Luisa Martinez joined Martin for a discussion and audience Q&A after the screening.
The following transcript has been lightly edited.
Luisa: How can people show the film? If I’ve just watched it, I’m motivated, and I’m part of a large organization, I’m part of a union, I’m part of a university, and I want to show this film. How do I go about doing that?
Abby: The good thing is, it’s out for free. Cuba After Castro dot com, baby, let’s go! You can host screenings, and that’s exactly why we made it into a movie, a really interactive narration. I think it’s just so incredibly enriching to live through those stories of the archival material that we were able to get from Cuba directly. So yes, everyone please screen it. It’s a tool for all of you. Because right now, the time has never been more urgent to build solidarity with Cuba.
Luisa: First off, I just want to say, personally, I love that President Díaz-Canel does not speak English. Or at least he doesn’t speak well enough to be able to respond to you. That is something that you will find even among left leaders in Latin America—they are often middle class, and they studied in the United States. Like Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico, who I love and who has done lots of solidarity work with Cuba, she speaks English. And he does not. So I love that and it separates Díaz-Canel from even the middle-class left leaders of Latin America.
Abby: You always hear this absurd talking point about “the sanctions affect the ruling class.” Who is the ruling class in Cuba? Because I’ve been to Díaz-Canel’s home, and it is very small. And his car is a beat-up Ford, it’s twenty years old, shit’s falling apart—it’s like, what are we talking about when we talk about the elites in this country somehow siphoning money off? It’s just outrageously false.
Luisa: So how did you get the interview? How did all of this come to be?
Abby: So, we sold our show Empire Files to Telesur, which is a Latin American conglomerate basically presented initially as a joint project from Fidel Castro and Hugo Chàvez that was trying to counteract the corporate media hegemony that was fomenting and agitating all of this false propaganda about their countries. And so they wanted to formulate an alternative narrative. As a socialist, I wanted to assist in that. And they knew that I was an ally, but I also proved my editorial freedom with Russia Today and working for Empire Files, going to Venezuela and proving that I’m not just a state propagandist, I’m not just an arm of any government, I will assert my editorial freedom and independence. I think that that’s exactly why they wanted me to present this interview, because I wasn’t going to be painted as a state propagandist, and they also knew that they could trust me with the information.
Luisa: We get this a lot, that if you say anything positive about Cuba, you’re just a propagandist. So what is your response to that?
Abby: You know, a lot of Latin American press has been like, this is just an extension of state propaganda. The film literally addresses the main pillars of propaganda that are used to justify these criminal sanctions. This criminal, suffocating blockade. President Díaz-Canel addresses them. He’s able to articulate at length and invert these concepts that are used to justify asphyxiating a country. Mass-murdering babies in the name of freedom and democracy. Can you imagine Trump or any of these disgusting con artists, the so-called representatives of this government, not surrounded by security detail or armed forces, walking en masse with people in their constituency? Can you imagine? And that’s what he does every day. Just like Fidel. No bullet-proof vests, they’re just out in the public. They’re truly public servants.
Luisa: I’m Chilean. I was born under dictatorship. I have lots of family who went through the dictatorship under Pinochet in Chile. For those who don’t know, Chile, many years ago, elected a socialist president. The United States did not like that, and so it started one of its earliest sanctions, or “economic pressure,” campaigns against Chile. That resulted in lots of shortages, people waiting in lines, and stuff like that. What I heard from family members is that, yes, we know it’s the United States that is doing it. But when you’re in line for hours, waiting for bread or waiting for milk or waiting for eggs, you’re more frustrated by the moment than you are by the politics. And so I was wondering, given your time in Cuba, your interview with Díaz-Canel, your conversations with Cubans, why do you think that the Cuban Revolution endures?
Abby: It’s a great question because, as we know, it simply has. Despite the vast resources of the richest government and military arsenal that’s ever existed. I mean, the CIA, as you just saw, admitted that their largest operation ever was on the streets of Cuba. What the fuck? That’s insane. And it still didn’t work! That shows you how strong the Revolution is. The only thing that I can really attribute it to, just being there and speaking to people of all stripes, of all walks of life, is that people just are so politically conscious, and so well-rooted into the struggle, because it’s all they’ve ever known. Especially the people who were born during the Special Period [after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Cuba experienced an extreme economic crisis]. And they may be disillusioned to a certain extent about what the Revolution brought their parents, but all they’ve known is hardship. They’re simply acclimated to it. But at the same time, they know what their parents have taught them, and they also have that spark of revolutionary fervor. And also the national perseverance of the project that they know, the sense that “we want to solve our own problems.”
And that’s another thing—people like [right-wing influencer] Nick Shirley, this fucking psy-op that’s deployed by Trump, who’s on the ground in Havana being like “I’m followed by cops and I was almost kidnapped!” Actually you can do whatever you want in Cuba. Literally! You can talk to whoever you want. A lot of people have a lot of critiques of the government. And they will happily come up and talk to you about what they disagree with. But then, I’ll be out there doing man-on-the-street interviews just to get a pulse of the Cuban people, and other people will come up defending the Revolution. It’s just unbelievable, like a raw analysis of what is going on. It is unreal how much attachment people have to the project, and I think it’s because of the assault from the West. Who wants to be attacked by a foreign power? Even if you have disagreements with your government. You see what’s going on in the world. You know that this is all about oligarchs and oil companies. You’re not going to give up your statehood and your sovereignty for that. So people don’t want to just lay down and die like dogs and be perfect victims. They want to stand up and fight just like they always have. And they’re preparing, just like they have been ever since the Cuban Revolution, even though they might not have the fruits of that anymore.
Luisa: Would you say that the political education of the Cuban people—not just cadre, not just the vanguard—has been an important aspect of the Revolution?
Abby: Yes. I mean, half of Americans don’t believe in climate change. Less now than they did five years ago. Who do you blame this on? Corporate media? The intentional obfuscation of these very obvious truths—Cuba does the opposite. Everyone is educated properly.
Audience Question: We saw in the movie the situation in the early 80s, the invasion by Reagan. Now Cuba is under the same threat. Trump and Marco Rubio have made it clear that they’re considering a military attack on Cuba. If it happens, those of us who support Cuba expect maybe something like what they did in Venezuela. The kidnapping or assassination of Raul Castro or Miguel Díaz-Canel. So my question is whether that came up in your conversations with him in private.
Abby: I think that it’s not going to be a Delcy Rodriguez situation, in Venezuela, where they found a vassal operative to basically make it a vassal state. It’s not going to happen in Cuba. And they know that it can’t happen, and that’s why they try to bomb these people from the sky, because they’re cowards. They can’t engage in ground combat. These people have been practicing for decades for exactly this scenario. So I think we all know what they need to do in order to usher in some sort of Pinochet-style dictatorship. It’s gonna be fucking ugly! The thing is, Trump’s the chaos president. He’s a nightmare mess, and the extremists are all latching their agenda onto him, so everything and anything is possible. And that’s why it’s so urgent for us to act! Because the rest of the world understands that this is complete madness. And it’s up to us.
Luisa: I went to China recently. President Xi Jinping spoke at a conference, and there were buses and buses and buses and buses of police. That deeply unfortunate thing happened in Venezuela. It’s not happening in Cuba, it’s just not going to happen. It would have to be a full-scale invasion, and they will die for this. They will die for the Revolution. What happened with Venezuela was very important but it’s not happening anywhere else. Everybody else is on alert because of this absolutely insane administration.
Audience Question: As you showed, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are both increasing their attacks on Cuba. What do you think needs to be done domestically in the U.S. to help the Cuban people, and how can we as Americans aid in that?
Abby: I think we need to resurrect the Anti-Imperialist League. This is something that has a rich tradition in this country. I’ve been traveling with the other film that I have on tour right now, which is Earth’s Greatest Enemy. In all these other countries around the world, I’m accompanied by senators and congresspeople and parliamentarians. Here? It’s fucking crickets. Because the bar is so goddamn low to subscribe to anti-imperialist politics. It’s sickening. We’re in such a dangerous and unpredictable moment, when Trump is being so obvious, you would think it would be easy. That’s why we need to really focus on anti-imperialism, widen our perspective and lens on international solidarity guiding all of our politics. We’re children of the empire. We have the duty and the privilege to spread this information, to incorporate human solidarity as the foundational principle alongside Gaza. Alongside all of these things.
I mean, I walk around Portland, as a resident here, and I love it. It’s this left aesthetic, everyone has anti-ICE stuff and “don’t bring the police state in my backyard.” But I’m like, what about the police state around the world? How do we link these things? How do we make it more apparent that this is the same thing? But once it’s out of our backyard, it’s still fucking there! And it’s killing kids, every day! So I mean I hate to say show the movie, but show the fucking movie! It’s one thing that we can do, and it’s also another thing we can do to just be aware of all these actions and solidarity. That’s what Cubans need, more than anything, is us engaging with them, showing them solidarity. To keep this resilience and fight-back going.
Audience Question: It’s such an honor to be here, and Abby you’ve been doing this work for a long time. I’ve been following you since 2012. There’s a lot of people in this room that are activists, a lot of people that are burned out. And you personally have lost so much and been through some situations that we would all consider very, very scary. And you’re still going. So I thought maybe you could give a message to the folks out here of not just how imperative it is, but how you find that fuel when you’re fighting this shit every day.
Abby: Thank you. I appreciate that. I think that I’ve gained so much more than I’ve lost. I’ve lost what, like mainstream credibility? Who cares? Who cares about these people? They’re complicit in genocide and war crimes and horrific atrocities. I’m proud to be rejected by these institutions. I am. And I’ve gained so much by traveling everywhere and meeting people who say “Gaza Fights for Freedom changed my outlook—I’m now an anti-Zionist.” Or “Earth’s Greatest Enemy made me an anti-imperialist.” “I changed my major.” “I left the military.” That motivates me more than any award or accolade ever could. And that’s why I do this work, and I’ve gained the world.
Audience Question: This is a bit of a trivial question. I noticed during the interview that he referred to the Cuban-American diaspora as a “mafia.” I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying in Spanish. Do they still call them gusanos over there? What’s the up-to-date pejorative for somebody like Marco Rubio?
Abby: Oh yeah, they’re fucking worms, dude. They’re maggots. For sure. He’s too polite. I’ll call them that. But yeah, the president is much too kosher to do that.
Audience Question: I really liked the use of the archival footage and it really heightens the points that are being made. I was just a little bit curious about how you all went about sourcing that footage. I also noticed there was some footage from U.S. corporate media. I’m curious if you actually went through licensing that or if that was more of a fair-use situation.
Abby: The film’s co-director Matt Belen went to Cuba, and they basically offered up their full archival database to us, which was a wealth of information. They don’t really follow copyright rules, though, so there’s like some Pink Floyd shit in there—we said, we can’t license this, even though Roger’s an ally. But it’s amazing the amount of original material straight from the Cuban archives that they just opened up completely. Absolutely phenomenal stuff. And the corporate media stuff, yeah, all fair use. In Earth’s Greatest Enemy, there’s so much military footage that makes them look insane. They released all that for free, online. Just like Israeli soldiers, these people think that they look cool destroying the planet.
Audience Question: So the Cuban Revolution has been able to endure for 76 years at this point. It was established by this extremely disciplined, extremely dedicated cadre that came out of the 26th of July movement. What organization that currently exists do you think is capable of producing a similar sort of extremely dedicated, extremely disciplined, group of people, who, if necessary, would be willing to confront violent state repression. Do you think the DSA could ever be that?
Abby: Let me flip the question around on you. With the technology that exists today, do you think that a small group of armed bandits from a mountain range can overtake this government? No, there’d be heat-seeking drones that would assassinate all of them instantly. It’s not the way the world works anymore. And so we have to completely change our strategies and tactics. That’s why we’re seeing inaction, that’s why we’re seeing such fatigue in the streets—people don’t know what the fuck to do. There’s a panopticon that we’re all willingly submitting ourselves to. So we have to really be creative, start breaking off and figuring out what are we doing to address these things collectively. But I agree with you, we need to be more militant. We need to be more angry. We’re not angry enough.
Audience Question: In the film, they spoke a lot about the importance of unity and international solidarity, and I was curious if you could share more about how the Cuban people view the American people, and what we can learn from them in understanding the people all over the world and how to be in solidarity.
Abby: Luisa said in the beginning that Cuba made her a socialist, and I’m assuming an internationalist in conjunction with that. And I think a lot of people have a similar story because Cuba has made internationalism such a core tenet of the entire founding philosophy of their socialist state. And I think that’s been so incredibly instructive for me, just to see their medical brigades. To be on the front lines of Hurricane Katrina. So what do they think of Americans? The same thing that Iranians or Palestinians think of Americans. When I go to Palestine they’re like “I love you, come in and have candy!” I’m like why? My government is murdering you! Because unlike Americans, they can distinguish between our government and us. So, Venezuelans and Cubans, they’re like, “we love you.” But Americans generalize everyone—it’s a really sickening trait. But it’s so different there. And Cubans have just made that such a foundation principle, it’s really something to behold.
Audience Question: In the last six months, Cuba has implemented the deepest market reforms in their country’s history, going even further than the market reforms of Deng in the 1980s. It makes sense why this has to happen, with the collapse of foreign currency reserves after 2020, under a brutal embargo. But it does raise questions about how the country can maintain its sovereignty as more and more of its economy is privatized to presumably Russian and Chinese investors. And how socialists should think about a socialist project that is increasingly being diverted into private market economies funded by private foreign investment capital. How should we think about this as socialists?
Abby: I think it’s that third way kind of ideal perspective, where people want to project whatever the ideal view of a socialist state is, and it’s just simply not possible under the current conditions. Look, I think it was a horrible idea. I think that these economic reforms are going to lead to more inequality, I think it’s just going to open up to more capitalist entrenchment that’s just going to exacerbate the problems that currently exist. I feel like they thought they had a gun to their head and they thought that this would help, acquiesce to the demands of the U.S., and we saw that actually it didn’t. It actually made them respond with more sanctions. So I think that’s the lesson for me. Never concede.
Luisa: Fidel was really honest during the Special Period. There was a pretty famous meeting where militants were basically trying to defend some of the reforms that happened during the Special Period when people were literally starving, which is not really different from now. They were defending it, they were excusing it, and he was like look, we’ve taken steps back. And it’s fine to admit that. If anything, it’s the honest thing to do. And so the idea is, in the future, when we’re stronger, we’re going to move forward. But let’s just be honest about the steps that we’ve taken as a Revolution. We have gone back. That is not un-revolutionary. It’s honest. It is an honest thing to admit, and it’s something that they were forced to do. And in terms of some of the investments, I don’t think they’re quite as terrible as people have portrayed, particularly when it comes to Russian and Chinese investment. I’ve been able to attend two Foro de Sao Paolo meetings, which is basically a coalition of left parties. It was formed under President Chavez and they meet a couple of times throughout the year. The Chinese Communist Party is there. The Russians are there. This is an alternative to U.S. gunboat diplomacy. Is it perfect? No, of course not. But countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico at this point, if they do it, it’s just to not piss off the United States. These are economic exchanges that are done because it is a capitalist world. And I think you can be sober about that. I don’t think you have to apologize for it. Like Abby said, there’s not a whole lot of alternatives right now. Just be honest about it. Have it be part of the political debate, which I think it still is.
Audience Question: What was it like to go to the countries that you visited and then come back and see how much the U.S. does consume and how much we produce and the differences in how much money we do have that we could be using to help other countries and stop genocides and essentially just stop hunger and all of these things that are happening? What was it like to realize how much propaganda is spread about other countries when you first started doing this sort of work?
Abby: I went there during the normalization period as the finale of Breaking the Set and it was a really beautiful, optimistic time where people were really happy, and so it’s been really devastating to go back and find that people are like, we’re back to square one and actually reversing to the point that we could argue it’s worse than the Special Period and we’re just fucking surviving. It’s really hard and I think a lot of Americans don’t grasp what that means to have weeklong blackouts. You’re handpumping generators and ventilators to keep babies alive in the NICU. This is what it means. It means vulnerable people dying every day. That’s what that translates into. It’s not just food getting spoiled or you’re not able to refrigerate your vegetables. You’re dying. And that’s what they want. As we saw, Díaz-Canel said the U.S. didn’t allow countries to sell us oxygen, because they wanted us to die. And that’s what the blockade has always been about.
As a media critic and analyst for the last twenty years, I still get taken by some of the propaganda because I see Human Rights Watch and Amnesty repeating some of this stuff about Venezuela and Cuba. And I go to Venezuela and I’m talking to people and realize, this is false. There’s food. It’s an actual economic war. Corporations like Polar who are withholding certain products to create an artificial shortage of toilet paper, to make us feel humiliated, and the corporate press dutifully repeats it. I can’t believe that I just believed this stuff because I was seeing it from Human Rights Watch. Or police forces killing people on the streets and it’s protestors going and throwing a Molotov cocktail in an armored vehicle, and the guy’s on fire. And MSNBC kept showing that over and over again. I went to Venezuela during the height of the violent protests in 2019, and I was absolutely horrified at the lies that you encounter firsthand. I was like oh my god, I cannot believe everyone is lying about this in unison.
So it is shocking, and I think Gaza really exposed that, where it’s not even a question anymore. People just see, you’re being told black is white and up is down. We know that the richest men in the world are artificially constructing a false consensus that doesn’t hold up to the reality that we see every day. So this is something that I think has been exposed forever, where back in 2019 it was a little more difficult.
Luisa: Going back to the propaganda, the first big delegation that DSA sent to Cuba was 43 people. Of those, a very small group decided to plan a meeting with dissidents. These were left dissidents, people who disagree with the party. So as part of that meeting—which we did not authorize as an organization, they just went and did it—the expectation of the people who organized it was that they were going to hear about all these stories of oppression. And the dissidents were like, no, that’s not what goes on. We just have disagreements about some of the decisions that have been made, but nobody’s being jailed, nothing like that. I did not go to this meeting, but my understanding is, you could see the disappointment in people’s eyes about the response from people who have disagreements with the majority within the party. I want to be clear, DSA sends people, we don’t send people who are fully bought into the Cuban Revolution. We send people who are on board with ending the sanctions. So the idea is that you want to expose people to Cuba who believe whatever they want but ultimately want to end the blockade. And the question is, why would you even send people like that? But that’s not the point. The point is to end the blockade, and that’s been the priority of the organization for years.
Audience Question: As a well educated journalist and someone who is good at their craft, what was the most important piece of information you had coming into the interview and what did you take away that was most pivotal from the interview?
Abby: Just how vastly different the value system is.
Audience Question: There’s a long connection between the Cuban cause and the Palestinian cause. And I noticed in the film there was some archival footage of people wearing keffiyehs and even waving a Palestinian flag. Could you speak a little bit about the connections between the Cuban Revolution and the coming Palestinian Revolution?
Abby: I just saw there was a UN resolution back during the 70s that deemed Zionism as racism. And it just shows you how obvious this all was on the international stage when anticolonial movements were on the rise around the 1967 war, when the U.S. really entrenched its relationship with Israel and started subsidizing this horrific genocidal apartheid state. It’s really amazing to see how clear it all was before that all kicked into gear. So Cuba was just on the truthful end of all of that the entire time. It was always completely understood that Israel was a fucking colony. A genocidal colony. So I think for the rest of us, we just went through these waves of conditioning where we got removed from where the rest of the world already was in that liberation struggle and their alliance with it.
Audience Question: Thank you for everything that you do, thank you Mike [Prysner, co-creator of the Empire Files] for everything you do. Because there was absolutely a time when I would have believed all this propaganda bullshit, and you played a role in helping to strip that away. So thank you. I wanted to kind of bring it back to Oregon, if I could, with the last question. What I’ve noticed here being a transplant myself from the military, from Ohio. Coming out here I’m thinking, it’s Oregon, progressive, we’re all going to be fighting the same fight. And then October ‘23 rolls around. And I’m seeing dead kids, dead babies. I’m looking around going, what the fuck’s going on? I see [Oregon U.S. Senator] Wyden, [and U.S. Representatives] Bonnamici, Salinas, Bynum, Boyle, Dexter, all out there, saying I got nothing for this? Can you share your perspective on what that cognitive dissonance is here, and how we can convince those 70% of voters that you have a representative that is willing to turn a blind eye on genocide and starving kids in Cuba, that you sure as shit can’t trust them with a data center.
Abby: I actually moved here to Portland October 9, 2023, and I was so devastated. I remember [U.S. Senator] Merkley was just absent for weeks and weeks and weeks. I went to his office and I was just like, arrest me! I was just laying down. His spokesperson was like, “he really cares,” but it took him like fucking two months to sign onto some ceasefire resolution, and then months later he’s at the Egyptian border virtue signaling. Why did it take you this long, man? Why did it have to get to this point?
[Former U.S. Congressman] Blumenauer, we were out in front of his house putting stuffed animals, months after, and he was just gone. I think the same thing every day. We live in Portland, Oregon. We should have been the first people to have an encampment. I mean what in the hell is going on? The sectarianism, all of this nonsense. This intraleft fighting, it’s all absolutely insane. We absolutely have so much power here, we could be leading the entire nation. We gotta get over this shit, man! I don’t know what the answer is, but it starts here! It starts with anti-imperialism, it starts with building a big tent, it starts with saying, Merkley, it wasn’t good enough. What they did wasn’t good enough.
And the data centers are happening right in our backyard. So there’s so much that we can galvanize around, so much we can collectivize around this issue, using Cuba, Gaza, the data centers, all of this is the same fight! ICE in our backyard! It’s the same fight. Every dollar that’s spent is a dollar wasted that couldn’t be spent on education, health care, everything. We know this! We know this and Portlanders know this. So what’s it gonna take? What’s it gonna take? I wish I knew. Join an organization, support organizations, support these movies, support independent journalists who are doing the work, and we gotta fight, and we gotta fight outside of the electoral system, even though we can vote and support insurgent candidates, that’s great. But we have to build up the labor movement and all these things outside of this. Start a strike fund. Shut down a fucking…we’re in Port Land. The land of the ports. Surely there’s a port that’s transporting some sort of sniper part to Israel, right? If we shut that shit down for a month, the world would end. So there’s so many things that we can do. And it goes back to the earlier question—we’re in different times now. I understand that. It takes a lot of strategizing. We don’t have the circle closed for us. That’s why we gotta show up and be engaged. Every single day. Like Díaz-Canel said: Politics is not a career. It’s life. It’s survival. It’s the future.