by Stephen Prager

The Trump administration has spent months targeting anti-Israel protesters for deportation as part of what it portrays as a fight against “antisemitism.” One of its latest targets is a Hasidic Jewish rabbi.

Yehonatan Ovadia, a 35-year-old Israeli citizen, was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on August 28 after being summoned to immigration court in Manhattan. He now sits in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, according to The New York Times, which broke news of his detention on Wednesday.

Ovadia, a father of five children, has lived in New York’s Rockland County since coming to the United States on a religious worker visa in 2022. He is a member of the Satmar Hasidic sect, an ultra-Orthodox movement that opposes Zionism on religious grounds, holding that Jews should not establish a sovereign state in the land of Israel before the coming of the Messiah.

Some members of Satmar have vocally protested against US support for Israel’s genocidal military assault in Gaza since it began in 2023.

“We demonstrated for Gaza, for the liberation of Gaza, for the rights of the Palestinians and to show to the world that the Jews, real Judaism, want to have peace,” Ovadia told the Times from detention.

As the death toll in Gaza has mounted, Ovadia has continued to attend anti-Israel marches across New York and New Jersey. Earlier this year, the government revoked his legal status after he appeared at one of these protests.

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

Photo caption.  Yemenis celebrate as they follow a convoy of freed prisoners from Mokha to Sana’a – AP Photo

The Trump administration came perilously close to launching another bombing campaign against Yemen this weekend. According to a September 20 New York Times report, US commanders had approved their targets, American troops were loading bombs onto warplanes, and an attack on Yemen’s Ansar Allah forces was about to begin when President Trump abruptly reversed course.

For two weeks, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had been pleading with Trump to intervene as Ansar Allah (Houthi) forces swept through Saudi-backed forces’ positions along Yemen’s Red Sea coast. Trump initially resisted, but after another urgent call from the Saudi crown prince, he instructed the Pentagon to prepare for airstrikes. By Sunday, he had changed his mind again, at least temporarily.

The New York Times reported that many of Trump’s closest advisers opposed joining the Saudi war. U.S. military officials also questioned whether renewed bombing would accomplish anything, given that Ansar Allah had withstood more than 1,000 U.S. strikes during a seven-week campaign in 2025. That operation consumed roughly $1 billion in munitions and other military resources in its first month alone.

Meanwhile, Ansar Allah has assured Washington that it does not intend to attack American ships. U.S. officials recently met Ansar Allah representatives in Oman in an effort to preserve that agreement. A new American bombing campaign could undo those diplomatic gains and threaten shipping through the Bab al-Mandab Strait just as the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted.

The crisis spawned by the US war on Iran spread to this dangerous new front on July 13, when the 2022 ceasefire between Saudi Arabia and the de facto Ansar Allah government in Yemen was shattered by a Saudi missile strike on the airport in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital.

The Saudi attack was designed to prevent the landing of an Iranian Mahan Air civilian plane carrying passengers returning from the funeral of Iran’s assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran. The flight was forced to divert to Hodeidah, 140 miles away on the Red Sea coast.

Yemen’s Ansar Allah forces retaliated by attacking the Saudi airport at Abha, near the Yemeni border, with missiles and drones. Since then, hostilities have escalated dramatically.

Ansar Allah forces have captured the strategic port city of Mocha and the remainder of the Red Sea coast from Saudi-backed forces. They are still fighting to consolidate control of the Kahbub mountains that overlook the approaches to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, but they are already preventing Saudi ships from sailing through the Red Sea.

The Saudis have responded with hundreds of air strikes on Yemen. Ansar Allah, in turn, has attacked Saudi airbases and oil infrastructure with missiles and drones. Either the Yemenis or their allies in Iraq struck pumping stations on Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline, which was the Saudis’ best alternative to the Strait of Hormuz as a route for their oil exports, shutting down the pumping-stations, and full operation of the pipeline, for at least a month.

The United States has dispatched an estimated 200 additional troops to Saudi Arabia to provide intelligence and targeting expertise for Saudi airstrikes, using programs like Palantir’s Maven AI system, which the US and Israel also use in Gaza, and which US officials now admit was used in the massacre at the Minab girls’ school in Iran in February.

The US State Department has also approved a $5 billion weapons sale that would provide Saudi Arabia with 5,000 2,000 lb. bombs and 5,000 500 lb. bombs, along with JDAM guidance kits and fuses. This comes in addition to a planned $24 billion sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to the Saudis and follows record US arms sales to Saudi Arabia for $110 billion in 2018 and $142 billion in 2025.

Congress has not yet consented to these latest Saudi arms sales that can only mean more death and devastation for the people of Yemen. Senator Markey, backed by Senators Merkley and Sanders, has filed a Joint Resolution of Disapproval that can stop the sale if it receives enough votes. Here’s a link to ask your senators to support it.

US support for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen is based on US recognition of the Saudi-based Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), chaired by Rashad al-Alimi, as the government of Yemen. The council was created in 2022 after former Yemeni president Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi resigned, following the UN-brokered truce.

But the renewed war raises a fundamental question: Why is the United States still treating a Saudi-based council as the legitimate government of Yemen, while refusing to recognize the government that actually controls the capital and governs most of the country’s population?

Since 2015, international recognition of Saudi-backed governments-in-exile has served to justify a decade of war and economic strangulation against 80% of Yemenis who live in the area governed by Ansar Allah, including Sana’a, the capital.

Between 2015 and 2022, with full US support, Saudi Arabia and its allies dropped over 69,000 bombs and missiles on Yemen, including thousands on civilian targets, killing at least 8,983 civilians, according to Iona Craig’s Yemen Data Project. By the end of 2021, the UN estimated that the war, blockade and resulting humanitarian crisis had caused 377,000 deaths.

So how did Yemen end up in such a frightful predicament? How can the United States, other countries, and even the UN, continue to recognize exile governments that have supported bombarding and starving their own people for over a decade?

The roots lie in Yemen’s failed political transition after the Arab Spring. In 2011, a mostly peaceful uprising brought down Yemen’s corrupt, repressive, US-backed president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. His vice president, Hadi, was appointed to a two-year term as interim president in 2012. Ansar Allah, based in Saada in north Yemen, played a leading role in the uprising against Saleh and participated in the National Dialogue that was supposed to guide the transition.

But Hadi failed to organize the planned election by February 2014. His term was extended for another year, but the transition again stalled. That’s when Ansar Allah moved south from its base in Saada, combining popular protests over fuel prices and the stalled political transition with an armed advance toward Sana’a. Its fighters entered the capital in September 2014, defeating government forces. Ansar Allah was subsequently granted seats in a UN-approved interim government under President Hadi.

But the power-sharing arrangement quickly broke down. Tensions between Ansar Allah and Hadi’s government escalated over the drafting of a new constitution and the division of political power. In January 2015, Ansar Allah seized the presidential palace, and Hadi resigned and retired to his home in Aden. Ansar Allah formed a ruling council to fill the vacuum.

However, a month later, with support from Saudi Arabia, Hadi rescinded his resignation and tried to reclaim the presidency. A few days later, he fled from Aden to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and, in March, 2015, the Saudis attacked Yemen, with US support. This led to a devastating, seven-year-long bombing campaign, with other Arab countries sometimes providing warplanes and ground forces. But the Saudis failed to restore Hadi to power or to capture the most populated parts of the country.

Both Hadi’s claim to the presidency and Saudi Arabia’s military intervention on his behalf lacked legitimacy from the outset. The Saudi assault on Yemen was not approved by the UN Security Council, making it a violation of the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of military force.

As the Saudi-led, US-backed war raged on, splits appeared in both the anti-Houthi forces and the countries backing them. The UAE backed a separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) in Aden, whose goal was an independent South Yemen.

The UAE finally withdrew its forces at the end of 2025, and the Saudi-based PLC defeated the STC in Aden. But Saudi-funded mercenaries, mostly from Sudan, and eight disparate Yemeni groups that still hold territory in the south and east, had neither the strength nor the unity to resist Ansar Allah’s offensive along the Red Sea coast.

Ansar Allah, by contrast, has grown stronger. Skilled Yemeni engineers have learned to manufacture missiles and drones, using parts imported mainly from China, and its forces have fought successful wars to defend Yemen from its enemies and exert control over shipping in the Red Sea, despite heavy US bombing campaigns in 2024 under Biden and 2025 under Trump.

They have also gained global support for their defense of Palestinians, launching missiles and drones at Israel and disrupting Red Sea shipping during Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Ansar Allah is now a well-established, and seemingly popular, nationalist government. This reality contradicts the Western assertion that they are simply an Iranian proxy.

In fact, Ansar Allah is deeply rooted in Yemen itself, emerging from the Zaydi religious and ethnic group of northern Yemen whose Imams ruled Yemen for centuries.

Zaydis currently make up between 35% and 45% of Yemen’s population, and have historically co-existed peacefully with their Sunni neighbors. It is simply wrong, legally and morally, to claim that a collection of Ansar Allah’s opponents holed up in Aden and hotels in Saudi Arabia are the legitimate government of Yemen, and that the government that has run the country and defended it against a decade of outside aggression is illegitimate.

As the UN General Assembly meets in New York this week, world leaders have a chance to address this injustice and its catastrophic impact on the long-suffering people of Yemen. China and other countries have long called for a political settlement. In 2018, 63 US Senators voted to withdraw US support for the war after the Saudis murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And in 2022, the UN successfully brokered a ceasefire that prevented large-scale hostilities for several years.

UN officials and world leaders should use this occasion to work for a diplomatic solution.

Recognition of Ansar Allah as the legitimate interim or transitional government of Yemen would be an important step to align the international response with the reality on the ground and with the Yemeni people’s desperate need for peace and self-determination.

At the very least, it is high time for the United States, the United Nations and the media to stop referring to a self-appointed gang of Saudi collaborators as Yemen’s “internationally recognized government.”

by Shireen Akram Boshar

On Sunday, the Green Party of England and Wales passed a motion defining Zionism as a form of racism. Within hours of the vote, Israel’s foreign ministry responded, slamming the motion and barring Green Party leader Zack Polanski from entering Israel.

“The Greens have adopted not only the green of Hamas, but also its ideology: the elimination of the State of Israel through armed struggle,” Israel’s foreign ministry posted on X, speciously comparing the left-wing British political party to the Palestinian resistance group.

The foreign ministry also called on the U.K.’s Labour Party to denounce the motion.

The motion passed at the Green Party’s annual conference on Sunday in a vote of 1,022 to 813. In addition to denouncing Zionism, it calls for a single state in historic Palestine with equal rights for all, with the right of return for Palestinians. The motion also acknowledges the right of Palestinians to resist, and reasserts the Green Party’s commitment to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign and a total arms embargo.

Israeli politicians from various political parties smeared the motion.

“Those who claim the antisemitic lie that ‘Zionism is racism’ deliberately endanger Jews and Israelis everywhere,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog posted on X after its passage.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid wrote on social media that “the UK Green Party has chosen to side with terrorists and antisemites” as Israel prepares to mark three years since the October 7 attack.

Notably, the vote was passed through the rank-and-file membership — which has nearly tripled in size over the past year since the election of Green Party Leader Zack Polanski and left-wing voters leaving the Labour Party over its stance on Gaza. But Polanski himself did not vote on the motion, and other Green Party leaders distanced themselves from the motion.

Backlash has also emerged within the U.K., including from members of the Labour Party — some of whom are calling on Labour leader Andy Burnham to rule out forming a coalition with the Greens.

This is not surprising, Charlie Hore, a socialist activist in the U.K., explained to Truthout — but it ignores the fact that the Palestine solidarity movement has transformed U.K. politics.

“At the Labour Party conference earlier this month, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband was forced to say that the Labour government had gotten Gaza wrong. What forced that is the massive shift in public opinion in the last couple of years in favor of Palestine and against Israel,” explained Hore.

The solidarity movement, and widespread shift in opinion, has also been credited as key to the Labour government imposing sanctions on Israeli settlements last month.

“Every major party in British politics supports the state of Israel, despite the occasional criticism,” Hore said. “The Greens have chosen the side of Palestine, and that’s going to be a good thing for taking the Palestine solidarity movement forward.”

by Ann Garrison

On September 17, the US allowed its extremely harsh sanctions on Eritrea to lapse, along with less harsh sanctions on Ethiopia. President Joe Biden had imposed these sanctions five years earlier, on September 17, 2021, in Executive Order 14046. With the usual hegemonic hubris, it declared that the war then raging in Ethiopia, in which Eritrea was fighting on the government’s side, posed an “extraordinary threat” to US national security.

When the sanctions were lifted, commentators were quick to conclude that Eritrea had surrendered sovereignty over its 700-mile Red Sea Coast to the US in exchange for sanctions relief. The X platform social media star Mario Nawfal immediately posted that “Washington just quietly bought itself a seat on the Red Sea.” Prominent left commentator Laith Marouf, on an Activist News Network podcast, later speculated that the US must have engaged in negotiations with Eritrea in hopes of establishing a ring of military bases from Somaliland to Djibouti and Eritrea to counter Ansar Allah (“the Houthis”).

However, there is no evidence that Eritrea engaged in any such negotiations or that it made any such concessions.

Eritrea’s Minister of Information, Yemane Gebremeskel, welcomed the US decision and said that the sanctions imposed by the Biden administration in 2021 “were not warranted by any metrics” and had caused incalculable economic damage.⁠

He added, “In this respect, we welcome the gesture and remedial measures by the Trump Administration.”

In subsequent remarks, he described the lift as reflecting “a reservoir of constructive political goodwill” that could open a new chapter of cooperation focused on investment and trade, and said that it sent a positive signal to the international community by removing a political obstacle to engagement.⁠ The Eritrean Ministry of Information published a statement using similar language.

These are fine words about what should motivate international relations, ideals that should be advanced. However, having suffered nearly two decades of US-imposed sanctions, Eritrean leaders no doubt realized that this was about US interests, as was shortly confirmed, when a State Department spokesperson told AFP that President Trump chose not to renew the 2021 national emergency “to advance US regional interests.”

The same official said that implementation of the 2022 Tigray peace deal had been “uneven,” but it was “time to adapt our foreign policy to current realities and collaboratively engage with both countries [Ethiopia and Eritrea] to advance US interests.”⁠

Eritrea, Ansar Allah, and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait

Just days before the sanctions were lifted, over the weekend of September 11–13, Ansar Allah seized the north side of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and surrounding Red Sea coastline. In a rapid offensive they captured the strategic port city of Mocha and Perim Island inside the Strait.

Eritrea holdssome of the coast on the southern side of the Bab el-Mandeb, as does Djibouti, which is home to US, Chinese, French, Italian and Japanese military bases. Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia maintain smaller footprints in Djibouti with logistical staging areas, or personnel attached to multinational operations.

No one of these parties could be said to fully “control” the Strait. It’s a delicate balance in which any one or any alliance among them might cause or counter disruption.

The Bab el-Mandeb is of course a key chokepoint on the maritime trade route connecting East and West, with cargo passing through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, and the Strait in both directions, from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean.

The US and Israel’s war on Iran has nearly halved the oil transiting through the Gulf of Hormuz, making the Bab el-Mandeb more geostrategically critical than ever.  Saudi Arabia began moving more crude through its Saudi Aramco East–West Pipeline, the main land route between its eastern oilfields to the Red Sea for transit north through the Suez Canal and south through the Bab el-Mandeb. Ansar Allah is disrupting that trade as it now fights, most of all, Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis have asked Trump to intervene but he has so far declined, reportedly after Ansar Allah promised not to break its 2023 ceasefire with the US.

One might conclude that Trump lifted the sanctions on Eritrea in response to Ansar Allah’s triumph, but back in April, the Wall Street Journal published a piece suggesting the possibility titled “U.S. Seeks to Reset Ties With Reclusive but Strategically Vital African State.” It said that the US was finally looking to lift some of the sanctions in hopes that Eritrea could become a “bulwark against Iranian influence.”

As I wrote at the time, this exposed the fraud that US sanctions on Eritrea had ever been about democracy or human rights, as was often alleged.  It was about naked imperial interest. Hegemony. Resources. Power, domination, and control.

Eritrea has resisted US domination for well over 30 years. It is the one African nation to have refused engagement with both AFRICOM and the IMF, and it has long been one of the most heavily US-sanctioned countries in the world. The sanctions just lifted excluded it even from the SWIFT system for conducting international financial transactions, like Russia and North Korea, and restoration to SWIFT remains just a promise that will take days or perhaps even weeks to negotiate, assuming the US follows through.

It now sits between two interconnected theaters of conflict, that in the Gulf and that in the Horn with its 700 miles of Red Sea Coast. Given all that its people have suffered due to the sanctions, it has every reason to welcome their lifting while at the same time keeping its cards close to its chest.

Did the US buy its neutrality? That may be what it sought, but Eritrea was already committed to neutrality in the Iran and Yemeni conflicts. Ethiopia has been threatening to invade Eritrea, making irredentist claims to its coast, since 2023, and the UAE-backed war in Sudan threatens the security of Eritrea’s Western border. This doesn’t leave Eritrea the leisure to engage in the US-Israeli war on Iran even if it were asked or were so inclined. Its leadership has to think of the Eritrean people.

I asked Eritrean American Elias Amare, noted Horn of Africa commentator and longtime supporter of his home country, for his thoughts on the sanctions’ lifting, and this was his response:

“As far as Eritrea is concerned, there is no quid pro quo in the U.S. lifting (or rather not renewing) its unjust, unilateral sanctions on Eritrea.

“⁠Eritrea maintains strict neutrality in the current conflict/war on Yemen.

“⁠Eritrea is wary of and vigilant about the usual ‘carrot and stick’ tactics of the Western imperialists. It must be noted that Eritrea is also a powerful cohesive state and not an easy pushover.

“Currently, Eritrea also has the strategic upper hand and is the center of gravity in the Horn of Africa and the critically important Red Sea basin and the Bab el-Mandab Strait choke point.

“Eritrea is always ready for a win-win proactive engagement with all forces in the region — as well as global powers — who respect her independence and sovereignty.”

There’s no sign that Eritrea’s done a deal with the devil, but only time will reveal the devil’s next move.

by Marie-May Jeremie

VICTORIA—Every year, sea turtles return to the beaches of northern KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa, where they began life. Once they leave the shore, some travel north through the Mozambique Channel, using waters and coastal habitats off Mozambique and Madagascar, while others journey into the wider Indian Ocean. South Africa can protect their nesting beaches, but no country alone can protect their entire journey.

The turtle embodies the central challenge of ocean conservation. Strong national action is indispensable, but protecting migratory species, interconnected habitats, and shared ecosystems requires countries to work together. And to do that, the finance supporting such cooperation must be capable of making the same journey as the turtle.

For the approximately 60 million people living within 100 kilometers (62 miles) of the Western Indian Ocean coastline, the stakes of conservation are immediate. Healthy marine ecosystems support food security, livelihoods, trade, and tourism, as well as providing bulwarks against storms. They are the natural foundation of the sustainable blue economies our countries are working to build.

But their value also reaches far beyond the region. Our mangroves and seagrasses store carbon. Our reefs sustain biodiversity. And our waters support migratory species whose journeys connect coastlines and the wider ocean. Protecting them may be a regional responsibility, but it is also in the rest of the world’s interest.

Regional leaders do not lack ambition, nor are we waiting for others to define what ocean conservation should look like. In my country, Seychelles, we have seen what can happen when ambitious goals are backed by strong political commitments and innovative finance. Our marine spatial planning and conservation-finance experience demonstrates that protecting the ocean can be integrated into national development. Now, other countries across the Western Indian Ocean are pursuing similar strategies shaped by their own priorities and circumstances.

Through the Nairobi Convention, governments have committed to stronger cooperation in developing sustainable blue economies and more effective, inclusive forms of ocean governance. The Regional Ocean Governance Strategy has established the mandate, and we are all now tasked with creating the financing mechanisms capable of delivering it.

It is a tall order. Achieving the common objective of protecting 30% of marine and coastal areas by 2030 requires more than drawing boundaries on a map. Protected areas must be supported by science, effective management, enforcement, community participation, and investments in sustainable livelihoods.

With the landmark Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction now in force, new possibilities are opening for conservation beyond national waters. The Western Indian Ocean region must be ready to influence how the agreement is implemented. Our responsibilities will extend far beyond any single project or grant. Reefs do not recover according to project deadlines, just as fisheries won’t be replenished in sync with funding cycles. Conservation requires continuity.

That is why women from three coastal villages in Anjouan, Comoros, formed an association after learning from fishing communities in Madagascar and Zanzibar. They temporarily closed part of their reef to octopus fishing, helped enforce the closure, and then waited. When the fishing ground reopened, the average octopus caught was twice its previous weight. The idea crossed borders because likeminded communities were open to learning from one another.

In these and other ways, Western Indian Ocean communities are already taking the lead on conservation. But sustaining and extending their progress requires finance that supports local leadership, knowledge-sharing, and long-term ecosystem management. National institutions and project investments remain essential, but some responsibilities are regional by nature. Fisheries can move and species can migrate between interconnected habitats.

No single fund can finance every item on the conservation agenda. Pollution controls, greener ports, and other maritime priorities require different instruments. Nonetheless, governments are working toward a Western Indian Ocean Regional Conservation Trust Fund (RCTF) that can fill critical gaps, mobilizing and deploying sustained finance for priorities that cross borders and are best addressed regionally. Designed to complement and not compete with national funds, development banks, and project finance, the RCTF will focus only where cross-border cooperation adds clear value.

The region is not starting from scratch on this issue. Consultations with governments, conservation organizations, and financial partners are already ongoing, informed by lessons from near and far. But the next phase must be government-led to determine the RCTF’s priorities, safeguards, governance structure, and relationship with existing institutions.

International partners can help accelerate that work. They are not being asked to create a new agenda or finance another isolated project. They can help build one component of a regionally owned financing architecture, directed toward conservation needs that conventional funding struggles to sustain. This is not simply about funding conservation in the Western Indian Ocean. The real opportunity is to invest in the region’s own capacity to lead the effort.

When governments meet for the Twelfth Conference of the Parties to the Nairobi Convention (COP12) next week, they will mark 40 years of cooperation through that agreement. They must also look ahead. A sustainable blue economy for the region must be built on healthy ecosystems backed by reliable, long-term finance. The goal for the conference should be to authorize a government-led next phase for the RCTF, defining where it can add value and how it should cooperate with other regional bodies.

The Western Indian Ocean is one connected system. Its future demands finance equal to the distance its species travel, the connections its ecosystems sustain, and the ambition its countries are bringing to the table.

by Alejandra Garcia Elizalde

Havana is facing an escalation of pressure in which threats of potential military action coexist, almost simultaneously, with messages from Washington about the possibility of reaching an agreement. Meanwhile, restrictions on fuel supplies and international trade are deepening the difficulties of ensuring essential services.

Will there be military action against Cuba? Will there be negotiations? Is Washington seeking an agreement or preparing for confrontation? Within a matter of hours, signals coming from the United States appear to be pointing in opposite directions.

On Friday, a CBS News report revealed that the U.S. military is assessing the availability of military police, engineering, logistics and medical units that could come under the leadership of U.S. Southern Command in the coming months. The internal document considers that some of these capabilities could be needed within a 90- to 120-day period. Citing U.S. officials, CBS reported that the process is part of military planning related to Cuba. The document, however, does not directly mention the island and does not constitute a deployment order.

The report came after U.S. intelligence agencies had analyzed months earlier how Cuba might respond to potential military action. CBS reported in May that Washington was studying options and the possible consequences of an intervention.

But just one day after the report emerged, President Donald Trump delivered a different message. He said that the United States and Cuba would probably reach an agreement and stated that he did not consider military action necessary. It is precisely this combination of threats and negotiations that places Cuba in a state of permanent uncertainty. An unprecedented psychological war.

The Threat as Everyday Pressure

For a country that has lived under sanctions, trade restrictions and political pressure from Washington for more than six decades, the possibility of military escalation does not exist in isolation.

This past week, Trump used his address to the United Nations General Assembly to declare Cuba a “failed state” and say that “freedom” would come to the island, while defending his administration’s policy of maximum pressure. The Cuban delegation then walked out of the chamber during his speech.

Days later, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla warned that Havana takes the military threats seriously because, he said, they are not limited to public statements but are accompanied by reports of concrete preparations. Rodríguez told the United Nations that Cuba would defend itself against any aggression and reiterated that the country poses no threat to the United States. The impact of this dynamic goes beyond whether or not a military operation actually takes place. Uncertainty itself becomes a form of pressure.

When a country must simultaneously contemplate the possibility of military confrontation, an intensification of sanctions and potential negotiations, the planning of its economy, energy system and public services becomes conditioned by constantly changing scenarios.

From Fuel to Hospitals

The economic dimension of this pressure takes a particular importance because fuel is not simply a commodity. In Cuba, it determines electricity generation, transportation, food distribution, water-pumping systems, agricultural activity and hospitals’ ability to maintain services during blackouts.

The Cuban government maintains that new U.S. restrictions on fuel shipments amount, in practice, to a naval blockade, due to the pressure exerted on countries, shipping companies and operators seeking to supply oil and other resources to the island.

foto: Bill Hackwell

The material consequences of the fuel shortage are visible. A Reuters report published in March documented the impact of fuel shortages and U.S. sanctions on Cuba’s healthcare system. According to figures from the Cuban Ministry of Public Health cited by the agency, around 96,000 people were then on waiting lists for surgery, including approximately 11,000 children, while hundreds of pediatric operations each week were facing shortages of medicines, oxygen, anesthesia and other supplies.

Cuban Foreign Minister Rodríguez has added another figure illustrating the scale of the problem: more than 7,000 containers carrying basic goods destined for Cuba are reportedly being affected by pressure on shipping companies. According to Rodríguez, a significant portion of these shipments contain food, medicines and medical devices that had already been contracted and paid for.

Thus, a decision made in Washington can have a concrete expression just 90 miles south of Florida: a medicine that does not reach a pharmacy, an ambulance unable to transport a patient, a generator without fuel, or a hospital facing a blackout.

A Contradiction Defining the Current Moment

The current paradox is difficult to ignore. On the one hand, the United States is increasing economic pressure and keeping the possibility of military action open. On the other, Trump says there is a possibility of reaching an agreement. And Cuba, while denouncing the threats, maintains that it is willing to engage in dialogue.

Rodríguez himself recently confirmed that contacts exist between Havana and Washington, although he said there has been no progress and that any eventual process would have to be based on respect, sovereign equality, international law and non-interference in Cuba’s internal affairs.

Therefore, the dilemma is not simply whether there will be war or negotiations. It is also about what it means to negotiate while maintaining a policy of maximum pressure from the White House. For Havana, it is not coherent to speak of dialogue while measures are being intensified that make access to fuel, financing, transportation and essential supplies even more difficult.

For Washington, in contrast, sanctions constitute a pressure tool intended to bring about political changes in Cuba and do not automatically amount to preparations for war. Trump has made the objective of these pressures explicit: “We want change in Cuba,” he said at the United Nations.

Uncertainty as the New Normal

foto: Bill Hackwell

Recent history shows that relations between Washington and Havana can change rapidly. One day there is a threat. The next, a statement about possible negotiations. Then, new sanctions. Followed by diplomatic contacts. And once again, reports of military planning.

This succession of contradictory signals creates a scenario in which uncertainty ceases to be exceptional and becomes part of everyday life. A war does not have to begin for a society to experience the effects of confrontation.

While Trump plays at war and uncertainty hangs over Cuba, resilience is being cooked over a slow fire: in a darkened apartment, a mother lights a wood fire to prepare food for her children, turning darkness and scarcity into yet another form of everyday resistance.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English

by Advocate Sudhakar Shunmugam

A river is not just a channel through which water flows. It is an ecological system, a source of food and livelihood, a regulator of landscapes, and in many regions, the foundation upon which human civilization has developed.

However, modern development has increasingly treated rivers as infrastructure: used to dam, divert, channel, extract water, and, in many cases, as a dumping ground for waste.

That approach has consequences. The question is no longer how much water a river can deliver. Rather, the question is whether human societies can continue to demand from them without destroying the ecosystems that support them.

Rivers are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis

Rivers are now bearing the brunt of the effects of a changing climate.

Changing rainfall patterns, prolonged droughts, severe floods, rising temperatures, and the rapid retreat of glaciers are altering river systems around the world.  For example, Himalayan rivers connect climate processes in the mountains to the lives and livelihoods of millions of people living downstream.

Climate change does not respect political boundaries. Water discharged from a mountain catchment may cross multiple jurisdictions before reaching the sea. As a result, river protection cannot be confined to administrative boundaries or considered solely as a matter of national policy. Water security is becoming increasingly inseparable from climate security.

Rivers carry the waste of technology

The modern river also carries another burden: the waste of technology and industrial civilization. Untreated sewage, industrial waste, plastics, agricultural chemicals, and other pollutants enter waterways every day. This damage is not limited to aquatic ecosystems. Polluted water can affect agriculture, fisheries, public health, and the economic security of communities.

If the waste of technological progress is transferred to nature and the costs are imposed on communities that did not cause the damage or did not consent to it, then that progress cannot be considered sustainable.

 The right to use a river cannot include the right to destroy it.

The river as a public trust

This is where law has an important role.

Natural resources essential to collective life cannot justifiably be considered the uncontrollable property of any individual, institution, or generation.  Governments have a duty to regulate their use for the public good and to protect their ecological functions.

The Common Good Principle provides an effective legal and ethical framework. Rivers should be managed not only for immediate economic benefit, but also for the benefit of present and future generations.

This requires more than just laws on paper.

Environmental standards must be enforced. Pollution must be prevented and remediated. Encroachments on floodplains and wetlands must be addressed. Excessive water abstraction must be regulated. Projects that could cause significant ecological damage must be subject to meaningful environmental assessment.

When the law imposes obligations, those obligations must have the potential to produce results.

Environmental justice is water justice

The burden of river degradation is rarely shared equally.

A polluted river may cause inconvenience to one section of society, but a loss of livelihood to another. Farmers may lose their irrigation.  Fishermen may lose their catch. Indigenous and riverine communities may lose access to their traditional resources. When safe water becomes scarce, poor families have fewer alternatives.

Environmental degradation therefore becomes a justice issue.

Those who contribute the least to pollution and climate change are likely to be among those who suffer the most severely. Therefore, any serious river policy must consider not only economic efficiency, but also equity, participation and the rights of affected communities.

Development must respect ecological limits

To protect rivers, society does not have to reject growth.

Cities must grow. Agriculture must produce food. Industries must operate. Infrastructure is essential. But development cannot proceed on the assumption that nature has an unlimited capacity to absorb human needs.

Wastewater can be treated. Pollution can be controlled. Wetlands can be restored. Floodplains can be protected. Sustainable water use practices can be adopted. Communities can be given a meaningful role in decisions that affect the rivers they depend on.

The goal should not be to force every river to conform to human convenience. The goal should be to allow human development within the ecological limits of the river.

A river still carries hope

Yet a river carries something else. It carries hope. As long as a river flows, civilization retains the opportunity to change its course.

 A polluted river can be restored. A damaged wetland can be restored. A floodplain can be protected. A community can restore its relationship with water. But restoration requires political will, scientific evidence, effective institutions, and consistent enforcement of the law.

Most importantly, it requires a shift in perspective. We don’t have to speak for a river forever. It requires us to stop silencing it. Let its water flow. Let its floodplains breathe. Let wetlands connect. Let communities participate in the decisions that affect their water. Let technology help ecological sustainability, rather than diverting its waste to nature.

The future of rivers will ultimately test the quality of our governance.

If we protect the systems that support rivers, rivers can continue to support civilization.

If we destroy those systems, no amount of legal proclamation, technological innovation, or economic investment will easily restore what has been lost.

 So, the choice is not between rivers and development. It is between responsible development and development that destroys its own foundations.

The simple principle is, Let rivers be rivers.

by Shrishtee Bajpai and Ashish Kothari

Photo caption.  Indigenous rights protest in India. Adivasi women from India’s central state protest against illegal mining and unlawful detention in the region. (Photo: Bhumika Saraswati/Creative Commons)

In light of the planetary polycrisis, it is time to challenge the dominant strand of Western thought that asserts only humans possess rights and that other species exist solely for human benefit. In their contribution to the Deep Democracy series, Shrishtee Bajpai and Ashish Kothari propose an Earth-centered form of governance. This form of democratic self-organization is based on the idea that all species and nature as a whole have rights.

“We sit around the fire and listen to stories. I come from Tharaka – the land of bees. Bees are very wise. Bees know how to select plants. Bees came from the sea and from the deep waters. There is a way we came to the land of bees. Our clans are from animals and our relatives are snakes, elephants, monkeys and trees. They are with us when we make decisions,” says Simon Mitambo, from the Tharaka community in Kenya.

For Simon and his community, along with several other indigenous peoples and other local communities across the world, this points to a deeper, wiser, more life-affirming notion of democracy than the one currently prevalent across the planet. It embeds a notion of earthy governance – a form of decision-making that is not centered on humans alone, but encompasses also the rest of nature.

“We are responsible for our self governance and we need to ensure that all are equally heard including the rest of nature. We can’t have that in a panchayat (elected village council) where everything is motivated through party politics,” says Tsewang Gyalson Lachungpa. He is an elder from Lachung, a village nestled in the eastern Himalayas in India’s state of Sikkim, near the border with Tibet. The village sits at an elevation of about 3,000 meters above sea level at the confluence of the Lachung Chu and Lachen Chu rivers.

Problems of liberal democracy

In making this statement, Tsewang Gyalson highlights the problems of modern day representative or liberal democracy. Such a model of governance relies heavily on elections and party politics, encourages hostility amongst sections of citizenry, favors those with lots of financial and other resources to put into campaigning (who then have to ‘recover’ what they spend through oft-dubious means), and usually ends up centering power in the hands of a few people.

As people like Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan have highlighted, the nation-state model sustains itself on the logic that nature – and colonized peoples – are things to be conquered, assimilated, dominated, and exploited. This logic was further supported through the capitalist and extractive modernity by asserting that the only way to organize lives is that of a centralized government that could help reach ‘welfare’ to the ‘masses.’ This has been used as a justification for taking over territories of Indigenous peoples and local communities for nationalist goals like ‘development’ and security.

So when someone like Gyalson says “We don’t want to tunnel our ecosystems. We don’t want to dam our rivers. All we have is our rivers, mountains and forests. If we destroy them, we can’t survive. We will be destroyed too” – his worldview comes in direct clash with the dominant, extractive worldview that views nature as a commodity to be destroyed in the pursuit of ‘progress’ (in its modernist, restricted Western sense of increasing material and financial prosperity).

Democratic decentralization

Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore stressed a lot on the need of Swaraj (self-rule) as a form of democratic decentralization which was a true form of independence. It was not only a political struggle but also a spiritual, economic and ecological struggle.

David Graeber and David Wengrow in their book, The Dawn of Everything, describe how Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island and Abya Yala (the Americas) show remarkable imagination of organizing and governing societies beyond the nation-state logic. What we in this essay demonstrate is that these alternatives continue to be built and nurtured by several communities in India and the rest of the world.

These offer interesting lessons on how democracy and governance can truly look like. We do this following the approach of not idealizing local communities (given especially that many of them have gender and other inequities) but rather highlighting the experimentation, imagination, ecological wisdom and joy, as well as mastery of the ‘art of not being governed.’

Alternatives to liberal, anthropocentric democracy

The fact that we do not have to be stuck with liberal democracy, if we are looking for truly participatory forms of governance, was demonstrated in narrative after narrative told to a gathering of Indigenous peoples, local communities, and civil society movements from over 20 countries, in South Africa, in February 2025.

This Global Confluence on Radical Democracy, Autonomy and Self-determination was organized by the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, Academy of Democratic Modernity, Jineoloji Academy, WoMin, and the Amadiba Crisis Committee. It provided an opportunity for communities to present their concept and practice of radical democracy, with an attempt to widely distribute power for decision-making. They discussed how their foundations were not based on hegemonic power and profits, but rather on justice, equity, and respect among peoples and with the rest of nature.

The host community, the Amadiba people of Xolobeni, gave a glimpse of how their governance works. While it has its structural hierarchies from local sub-chiefs to the king, in practice people have considerable power to take and influence decisions. Political or traditional ‘leaders’ who have tried to align with exploitative outside forces (such as mining companies), have been deposed. For various historical reasons, women have considerably greater say than is the case in many other communities in South Africa. A crucial basis of autonomy here is that all land is held in the commons, and is not privatized.

Several other such examples were presented at the Confluence: the Kuna Indigenous peoples in Panama, the Lachung people in Sikkim, India, the Karen in Burma-Myanmar, the Kurdish in central Asia (especially in Rojava, Syria), the Tharaka community in Kenya, the Sarayaku people in Ecuador, the Tao and other Indigenous peoples in Taiwan, among others. Though not present, the example of the Zapatista autonomous region in Mexico was oft-cited.

In all of these cases, people are not accepting the domination of national governments, nor of capitalist corporations, but are asserting their own systems of governance. But they also realize that there are internal inequities and conflicts (gender-based, ethnic, etc) in their communities, so a crucial part of their initiatives is to enable greater voice for the marginalized sections, and create conditions of greater equality and equity.

Elements of earthy governance

At the core of earthy governance is an intrinsic wisdom, an ethical understanding that since human communities are part of nature, the more-than-human communities who are part of the web of life have to be integral to governance. Listening and following the ways or laws of rivers, mountains, forest deities, among others, the communities are asserting the way of being that is in rhythm and moods of the natural world. This is not just about adjusting to nature, but about recognizing that it is this web that threads life as a connective tissue. What is striking in all the examples mentioned above is the ability of the community to design systems that work in their own autonomous ways, and are based on collaborative design principles, responding to place and ecologically sensible. Several communities design their governance as Designs of Coherence, with a thorough, clear, and non-colonial or (if more recent) decolonial lens which intentionally builds systems that nurture local, enhance moral responsibility, internalize the costs and maintain collective restraint.

What’s interesting in several such examples is the role and nature of power. There is no homogenous way that power operates, but what we can see is that power is broadly rooted with care and on the ground. There is power, but is subordinated to feedback of actions from others in human communities, and from lands, mountains, rivers, and ecosystems that the communities inhabit. There is no authority without responsibility. The vision embedded in several of these practices is of building movement, and of struggling and striving for nature’s sovereignty over state sovereignty, by being custodians for territories of life including all creatures and all beings. It is this recognition that uniquely embodies people’s daily life, collective livelihood and seasonal production activities including their institutions. Ceremonies and rituals become part of restoring/regenerating these relationships continuously. Most of us in modern industrial and urban contexts have lost the relationality that nurtures humans and more than human connections. However, earthy governance can only thrive if this relationality becomes part of everyday living.

In radical democracy and earthy governance, institutions of decision-making have collective, democratic processes of deciding how to manage, use, and conserve the commons. The ethics of commons and custodianship is deeply central to such governance. The communities described above display a plurality or diversity of political representation, beliefs, interests and ways of being (including legal and other forms of institutional pluralism) demonstrating pluriversal radical democracies.

An aesth-ethics of life

Another crucial element one can discern in many such practices and worldviews, is the seamless integration of beauty and ethics – an aesth-ethics of life. An aesthetic gaze on nature, seeing the inherent and incredible beauty in its elements and functioning and rhythms, just as much as we see beauty in human works of art, is intricately connected to treating it with respect. Diversity itself becomes an ethic, one that is found abundantly in Indigenous and community worldviews, quite contrary to the homogenizing tendency of dominant and colonial Western ideology.

That brings us to our last but not the least crucial element: challenging a dominant strand of Western thinking, that humans alone are possessed of rights and that other species exist for human use. Instead, earthy governance is built on the understanding that all species, and nature as a whole, are the subject of ‘rights’, or (to use less formal language) are worthy of respect and equal treatment. This clearly articulates imaginative and radically alternative ways of being in the world.

When the Dongria Kondh adivasi (Indigenous) people in the state of Odisha, eastern India, were asked whether the UK-based company Vedanta could mine their hills, they said such a decision could be made only in conversation with the deity of the forested hills, Niyamraja. In doing so, and eventually rejecting the mining proposal, they practiced a form of earthy governance we can all learn from.

by Paul Le Blanc

Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium: Radical Ecology and the Global Plantation is a handsomely crafted and inspiring volume to be savored and shared, thanks to the uniquely exquisite sensibilities of Rosa Luxemburg and the splendid labors of the book’s editor, Claudia Horn. Richly illustrated by Luxemburg herself — with beautiful reproductions from among the many hundreds of samples in the 17 notebooks that contain Luxemburg’s drawings of vegetation and the pressed plants themselves, enhanced with numerous marginal notes by her in German — the book also provides well-chosen slices from correspondence with some of her closest friends, along with insightful and informative commentary from the editor. Revealed to us are little known dimensions of Luxemburg the outstanding thinker and revolutionary, but also the generously gifted human being.

Qualities of thought and revolutionary practice

Luxemburg wanted to replace the established order with a genuinely democratic and socialist future. The old order in Germany had taken the form of voracious capitalism integrated with a reactionary elite of land-based aristocrats. Much has changed in the world since, and yet Luxemburg’s perspectives have never stopped resonating in countries throughout the world to the present moment.

For her revolutionary commitments, she was denounced as “bloody Rosa”. Many (including moderate socialists) agreed with the highly esteemed centrist-liberal/conservative sociologist Max Weber. He was fiercely critical of the Spartacus League, which Luxemburg led with her comrade Karl Liebknecht in 1919. Several days before they were brutally killed in the so-called “Spartacist uprising,” Weber said that “Liebknecht belongs in a lunatic asylum, and Rosa Luxemburg in a zoo.” While he had not advocated their murder, it seems not to have shocked him. “Liebknecht was undoubtedly an honest man,” Weber commented, once the deed was done. “He called on the street to fight — the street killed him.” Much the same could have been said of Luxemburg. Of course, they were not killed by “the street,” but by a right-wing paramilitary, the Freikorps, commanded by officers from Germany’s reactionary elite, with tacit support from more moderate “law and order” elements.1

The personal qualities of “bloody Rosa” — who spent years in prison for her beliefs — do not correspond, though, to Weber’s anti-revolutionary caricature. Horn cites the testimony of one of the many prison staff members who befriended her (in this case a non-commissioned officer, Arthur Gertel, who was tasked with accompanying her on walks that she was permitted to take):

She was an intellectual genius yet full of kindness and compassion for all beings, human or animal… And yet the newspapers called her “Bloody Rosa.” The sharpness and refusal to make fundamental compromises that characterized Rosa Luxemburg’s political speeches and writings undoubtedly stemmed from her outrage at all injustice.2

It is the crescendo of injustice and horrific violence — inherent in capitalism, imperialism and global war — that would finally bring an end to Luxemburg’s life in 1919. That is not the focus of this volume. What Horn presents to us, however, transcends the violence in a way that refuses to push aside Luxemburg’s determined struggle to replace it with something better. As she emphasizes, “Luxemburg’s expansive sensitivity to human and non-human suffering drove her unswerving, unfailing, and uncompromising commitment to the cause of world revolution.”3

Enlightenment, Romanticism and the natural world

The great intellectual-cultural streams of the Enlightenment and Romanticism blend in this remarkable woman, with — at the very same time — rock-hard yet supple Marxist convictions that had become inseparable from a passionate yet very conscious connection to the natural world. Her strong bond with blue-feathered titmice is especially evident. She would feed them between the bars of her prison window and copy their bird song. In a letter to Mathilde Jacob, Luxemburg boasted that she could imitate them so well “that they all immediately come running,” adding: “In spite of the snow and frost and loneliness, we believe — the titmice and I — in the coming of spring!” In another letter to Sophie Liebknecht, she confessed that “sometimes, it seems to me that I am not really a human being at all, but rather a bird or a beast in human form.” In yet another letter, she proudly confided to Luise Kautsky:

The great titmice are in loyal attendance in front of my window; they already know my voice exactly; and it seems they like it when I sing. Recently I sang the Countess’s aria from Figaro, about six of them were perched there on a bush in front of the window and listened without moving all the way to the end; it was a very funny sight to see.4

Little wonder that she fantasized: “on my grave, as in my life, there will be no pompous phrases. Only two syllables will be allowed to appear on my gravestone: ‘Tsvee-tsvee’” (her transliteration of the titmouse call that she had mastered). While expressing the fervent hope that her death would come in the struggle for the socialist cause, she confessed “my innermost self belongs more to my titmice than to the ‘comrades’.”5

In fact, her expansive temperament embraced the whole of the natural world. “Inwardly,” she wrote, “I feel so much more at home in a plot of garden … and still more in the meadows when the grass is humming with bees, than at one of our party congresses.” As this little volume reveals, Luxemburg shared the passionate engagement of the bees and other creatures with the flourishing and sometimes struggling plants of all kinds — which delighted and fascinated her. Yet she insisted that nature was not, for her, “a restful refuge,” noting that “in nature too, at every step, I find so much that is cruel that I suffer very much.”6 The point was to be vibrantly aware, conscious of, and in tune with the wondrous reality of life — deeply in touch with herself and the vast and complex world around her.

In more than one way, this informed her political understanding and orientation. Luxemburg tirelessly analyzed the causes and impacts of the catastrophic horrors of World War I, with the conviction that “by its nature, socialism cannot be imposed” — that the key to reaching it could only be found through “uninhibited, effervescing life,” which meant that “experience alone is capable of making corrections and opening up new paths.” While the failure of the international socialist movement to stay true to its principles in resisting the global imperialist war brought a devastating “misfortune for humanity,” she insisted, “socialism will be lost only if the international proletariat refuses to learn from it.”7 Revolutionary consciousness and insurgency cannot be manufactured from the top-down. It must flow from actual experience as a collective process.

Capitalism and metabolic rift

Even more than was the case with the cataclysms of global war in 1914-18 and 1939-45, all human and non-human life on our planet is threatened by unfolding and intensifying ecological disasters. Just as imperialism and the global wars it generated were not simply the fruit of mistaken policy decisions — according to Luxemburg’s penetrating analyses — so is the environmental crisis not the outcome of policies that can simply be reversed. Both flow inexorably from the accumulation process at the heart of the capitalist economic order in which we live. Horn notes the same point when she writes, “profit seeking capitalist behavior causes various kinds of economic imbalance.”8

This imparts a special urgency to aspects of Luxemburg’s application of ecological sensibilities to her development of Marxist analysis. It is related to the notion of “metabolic rift,” recently highlighted in significant studies by such “eco-Marxists” as John Bellamy Foster and Ian Angus.9 Foster and Angus, following Marx — as Horn puts it — use the metaphor of “metabolism” to describe “the complex, interdependent process linking human society to nature.” According to Horn, “all economies transform — metabolize — physical materials such as wood, water, and soil into goods for use or exchange.” But “if producers do not exploit those natural resources in a sustainable way, both the resources and the economic system they support may be exhausted.”

Drawing from Luxemburg’s classic The Accumulation of Capital (1913), Horn presents the view that “capitalism was not a closed system but rather operated within and depended upon a wider, non-capitalist ‘milieu’.” In fact, “capital accumulation had required the continuous absorption and transformation of resources — both human labor power and natural materials like wood or minerals — that originated outside capitalist societies.” Capitalism existed “not as a stable equilibrium but as a ceaseless, violent churn.” This was stressed in Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism as a perpetual invasion and exploitation of non-capitalist portions of our planet.

In Luxemburg’s words, “capitalism feeds on the ruins of such organizations, and, although this non-capitalist milieu is indispensable for accumulation, the latter proceeds, at the cost of this medium, by eating it up.” Horn draws out this point: “Eating up the conditions for its survival, ‘capitalism prepares its own downfall under ever more violent contortions and convulsions.’” Nonetheless, as Horn observes later, “the capitalist system continues to displace the real costs of production, such as environmental destruction, outside the realm of capital accumulation, to be borne off-books by exploited people, non-human animals, and future generations.”10

Horn strongly suggests that Luxemburg’s particular analysis of imperialism suffered from its own flaws, to which she gives serious attention, but insists on the relevance of much of what she had to say about the capital accumulation process:

If history has not borne out Luxemburg’s argument that capitalism depends upon both exploiting and incorporating the non-capitalist world, such that it must inevitably exhaust itself, still, the enduring relevance of her analysis lies in its global scope; its sensitivity to the physical predicates of economic growth; its focus on the boundaries that capital constantly transgresses, polices, and redraws; and its attentiveness to the broad coalitions these trespasses and depredations could bring together in resistance.

The qualities of this remarkable book certainly do justice to the multifaceted person who was Luxemburg, but they also speak to us on a variety of levels about the meaning of life and about what must be done in the present moment.

• 1Alexander Behrens, review of The Young Max Weber and German Social Democracy by Victor Strazzeri (Brill 2022/Haymarket, 2023) in The Progressive Post, July 16, 2024, https://feps-europe.eu/inspiration/the-young-max-weber-and-german-social-democracy/.
• 2Claudia Horn, ed., Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium, 14.
• 3Ibid., 19.
• 4Ibid., 15-16, 48, 136-137. Blue tufted titmice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcQOEMxYUMU; Mozart aria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaZTuRBFtDk.
• 5Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium, 15-16.
• 6Ibid., 16.
• 7Ibid., 16, 13.
• 8Ibid., 52.
• 9See, for example, John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000) and Ian Angus, Metabolic Rifts: Capitalism’s Assault on the Earth System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026).
• 10Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium, 51, 52, 55-7, 58, 211.

by Alejandra Garcia Elizalde

Photo caption.  Eye Hospital Jose Marti in Montevideo

The United States has reportedly communicated to the Uruguayan government that it must end the presence of the Cuban Medical Brigade, particularly the Cuban Ophthalmology Brigade, which has operated in the country since 2005. The U.S. pressure could include sanctions, including the possibility of placing Uruguay on an international blacklist—potentially affecting military cooperation and technical assistance between the two countries.

At the center of the controversy is the José Marti Ophthalmological Hospital in Montevideo, founded in 2007 under the Operation Miracle program through a cooperation agreement between Cuba and Uruguay. The hospital provides free eye care, including cataract surgeries, corneal transplants, and treatment for glaucoma and strabismus.

As of September 2026, the Cuban medical brigade has reportedly carried out more than 120,000 free procedures, primarily benefiting low-income Uruguayans.

Although Uruguay is a small country, it has not yielded to U.S. geopolitical pressure in South America. Alongside Brazil, it represents a degree of resistance to U.S. influence in the region, including by declining to join the U.S.-led Shield of the Americas.

Uruguay has also declined to accept Cuban deportees, despite reported pressure from the United States to do so. Another point of contention is Uruguay and Brazil’s decision not to join the Western Hemisphere Joint Task Force, a U.S.-led initiative ostensibly aimed at combating drug cartels across the Americas. Yet beyond its stated objectives, the coalition can also be understood as part of Washington’s broader effort to consolidate alliances and reinforce its influence in the region as it confronts what analysts describe as a process of imperial decline.

According to reports by Uruguayan journalist Gabriel Pereyra, Uruguay’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defense have allegedly received formal warnings from the United States demanding the withdrawal of the Cuban medical brigade.

If Uruguay fails to comply, it could reportedly be placed on a blacklist over alleged forced-labor practices, potentially jeopardizing U.S. support for military training and equipment. Washington has continued its campaign to discredit Cuban healthcare professionals, using the medical mission as an instrument of geopolitical pressure.

Operation Milagro patient, foto: Bill Hackwell

However, Foreign Minister Mario Lubetkin has said that Uruguay has received no official communication to that effect, although he acknowledged that the issue is being discussed. Lubetkin described Uruguay’s experience with Cuban doctors as “extraordinary,” emphasizing its humanitarian and social value and stressing that it carries no political connotations.

Uruguay is not an isolated case. For more than six decades, Cuban doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals have provided medical assistance around the world. Between 1960 and 2023, approximately 600,000 Cuban healthcare professionals participated in medical missions across 165 countries. Yet several governments, including that of the Bahamas, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Paraguay, have reduced, reviewed, or ended medical cooperation agreements with Cuba amid pressure from Washington.

“They are punishing the most disadvantaged peoples and communities in the region, who for decades have received Cuban medical care. In return, they promise resources that we know will never arrive or benefit those populations,” Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez has said.

The Cuban presence in Uruguay is another example of a decades-long tradition in which Cuba has sent “doctors, not bombs”, providing lifesaving assistance during health emergencies and natural disasters. It is a tradition that Cuba says it intends to maintain, continuing to extend a helping hand wherever vulnerable people are in need.