When Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959, 13-year-old José Azel joined the ranks of the underground opposition engaging in acts of sabotage. When Castro closed the country’s schools, José’s father became worried. So he sent his teenage boy on a brief trip to West Palm Beach in June 1961 on a cargo ship full of seminarians. It was the last time they saw each other.

From 2021 to June 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported just over 400,000 “encounters” with unaccompanied children. The quality of care for these kids has been dubious at best and abusive at worst. Today’s numbers may be unprecedented, but this group is not—in fact, they are part of a long tradition of young people finding refuge in the U.S. without their parents.

In the early 1960s, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare created the Unaccompanied Cuban Children’s Program to care for thousands of minors fleeing their country after its 1959 revolution. Colloquially, it was known as Operation Pedro Pan—a reference to the tale about the boy who could fly. Like today, in the 1960s a vocal contingent of naysayers balked at the newcomers: Some feared that there could be communists in the unvetted masses, while others asked why taxpayers should shoulder their financial weight. Yet drowning out these doubtful voices was a larger willingness to accept the children and to affirm the country’s tradition of sanctuary and freedom in doing so.

The more than 14,000 Cuban minors who arrived to the U.S. between 1959 and 1962—then the largest group of unaccompanied children in U.S. history—were among the 250,000 Cubans who trekked across the Florida Straits during that period. In contrast to today’s migrants, the Cubans were cast as refugees and symbols of anticommunist heroism. President John F. Kennedy reminded the country that welcoming refugees was a Cold War imperative. In a letter to Congress, Kennedy heralded the U.S. as “a refuge for the oppressed” with a “long humanitarian tradition of helping those who are forced to flee to maintain their lives as individual, self-sufficient human beings in freedom, self-respect, dignity, and health.”

The Children’s Program resettled young people across the nation in group homes and with foster families throughout the country—from Helena, Montana, to San Antonio, Texas, to Dubuque, Iowa—largely paid for by state and federal coffers. At times, parents did not know where their children had been relocated.

The program relied on a vast network of federal and state offices and a long list of nonprofit church groups, child welfare agencies, and Pan American and KLM airlines, which would help procure seats for these children, as well as embassies, parochial schools, and a counterrevolutionary network in both nations. Those without immediate family support in the United States—more than 8,300 children—received care through the Catholic Welfare Bureau and other religious, governmental, and non-governmental organizations.

Some Pedro Pans found respite with Protestant, Jewish, and secular organizations, but the nucleus of the program was the Catholic Church, which assumed responsibility for 7,346 Cuban children. At the program’s helm was Bryan O. Walsh, an Irish priest who’d recently relocated to Miami, and embraced his mission with gusto. Walsh later called his role in Operation Pedro Pan “an opportunity given to me by Divine Providence to combat communism.” He had ample support from the Church, which also opened its doors to Catholic leaders isolated and banished by the Cuban government.

After arriving in the U.S. with a group of Catholic seminarians, José Azel jumped into the world of American adolescence. The transition was connected to the automobile, and he remembers the immense glee he felt registering for a driving permit. Football, rock ‘n’ roll, and an occasional cigarette rounded out the adaptation process for the young man.

Other Pedro Pans tell similar bittersweet stories of their crossings. Mayda Riopedre was a 15-year-old student at American Dominican Academy in Havana when she arrived in Miami. Mayda had lived a privileged and “very American” life in Cuba— she took classes in English and U.S. history, listened to American shows on the radio, took ballet and piano lessons, and had a French tutor.

After spending a month in a transitional shelter, Mayda Riopedre and her sister spent a month at St. Mary’s Home in Dubuque, Iowa, where they went bowling for the first time, before being sent to live with a family in Signal Mountain, Tennessee. She retains some very pleasant memories of her time there, but she also recalls a favorite outdoor spot where she would look at the mountains and cry inconsolably. The sisters and their parents reunited two years later, and today Mayda considers herself “lucky” and will be “forever grateful” for the foster family.

Why did so many parents choose to send their children away? The upheaval of the revolution—including school closures and new revolutionary pedagogy, nationalized property, and rumors that Castro’s government would dispossess parents of their children—was frightening enough to make the decision feel warranted for many Cuban families.

They also believed that the separation—and Castro’s reign—would be brief. But most Pedro Pans did not see their parents for months or even years —and in rare cases, like José Azel’s, ever again.

Now in their 60s and 70s, the former Pedro Pans—many of whom are part of Florida’s large Cuban community—find themselves ensconced in the vitriol surrounding today’s migrant children. Unlike the majority of Pedro Pans, who lived comfortable lives in Cuba, these young people come from locales ravaged by violence and economic scarcity.

And they are receiving a very different welcome. In 2019, 3,000 children were housed at a center in Homestead, Florida, five miles from the Florida City camp that had sheltered hundreds if not thousands of Pedro Pans. Then the Trump administration closed it, which drew criticism from those who argued that the state should provide suitable accommodation for children, as it had done 60 years prior with the Cuban Children’s Program.

More recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis bickered with the Miami Archdiocese after he issued an executive order that curtailed the ability of Florida agencies to care for undocumented migrants, including children. Pedro Pans took sides: Some argued in favor of sheltering the minors while others sided with DeSantis and drew differences between today’s young migrants and the Cold War context of their own crossings.

As their hesitancy indicates, today many Americans are reluctant to support similar groups in need. The country took in just 11,411 refugees in the 2021 fiscal year, the lowest number since 1980. UNICEF estimates that a record 43.3 million children live in forced displacement worldwide. Those crossing the U.S. border often remain invisible or banished to the status of a national crisis rather than an opportunity to provide help. But the Pedro Pans, aided by government assistance and everyday American altruism, exemplify what is achievable when we harness our abundant resources and guarantee our healthy tradition of refuge for the world’s most vulnerable populations.

The post When the U.S. Welcomed the ‘Pedro Pan’ Migrants of Cuba appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was October 5, 1945. The Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a union representing craft laborers in Los Angeles, including painters, carpenters, set designers, cartoonists, and others, was seven months into a major strike that was causing Hollywood studio moguls to panic. Although major studios, including Columbia, RKO, and Universal, had over 100 unreleased films in the can, ready to be released, the CSU’s strike actions, as well as movie theater boycotts, were an effective blow against the post-war studio system.

Now, the strikers gathered at the Warner Bros. employee entrance to protest.

The violent standoff that followed, in which strikebreakers, armed with chains, hammers, pipes, and other weapons, descended upon the workers, with county police forces closely behind, would become known in Hollywood as “Black Friday.”

With moguls, Los Angeles Police, private police forces, and organized crime on one side and striking trade unionists on the other, the episode fanned the flames of anti-communism in Hollywood, and led directly to the union’s downfall the following year. In the years to come, the strike would be used as a cudgel against progressive trade unionism inside and outside of the film industry, leading to the blunting of it in Hollywood—and in the United States, more generally.

The strike of 1945 started after the CSU became embroiled in a dispute with a rival union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). The conflict centered on 77 set decorators who had broken away from IATSE, and established their own group, the Society of Motion Picture Interior Decorators, in 1937. The CSU initially represented these breakaway set decorators during their independent contract negotiations with some studios. Eventually, IATSE began to dispute CSU’s jurisdiction, and after studio producers sided with IATSE—contradicting an arbiter appointed by the War Labor Board—the CSU went on strike.

Competing interests in Hollywood, from studio moguls like Cecil B. DeMille, to mobsters like John Roselli, saw the unions’ dispute as a threat. It wasn’t just about disrupting the flow of capital in and out of the film industry. They also understood that cinema served—and still serves—a vital role in shaping and massaging mass consciousness. Which is why, for moguls and organized crime organizations alike, combating the perceived infiltration of Moscow-backed Reds in Hollywood was as important as any financial concern.

Studio moguls widely alleged the strike of 1945 to be Communist-led—though the Communist Party was initially opposed to the strike. CSU president Herbert Sorrell personally faced accusations by Walt Disney, IATSE leadership, and others of being a Communist dupe. (Though when he was dragged before the California Legislature’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities a year later, there was scant evidence linking him to the Communist Party—his militant trade unionism was homegrown.)

Regardless of the facts, the anti-communist hysteria of studio moguls and state and federal investigators ultimately spelled the downfall of the CSU. The congressional investigations into the alleged infiltration of communism in Hollywood and trade unions like those in which Sorrell was interrogated, resulted in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which sought to purge not only communists, but also class-conscious workers, from union leadership roles. The law severely limited the power of unions: It required union leadership to sign non-communist affidavits and outlawed jurisdictional strikes like the one enacted by the CSU.

Following on the heels of Taft-Hartley came the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, which culminated in the well-known Hollywood blacklist and the eventual jailing of the “Hollywood Ten,” film industry members who refused to testify. The notorious Smith Act trials between 1949 and 1958 saw the jailing and deportation of Communist leadership, including Benjamin Davis Jr. and Claudia Jones, across the United States. The rise of Sen. Joseph McCarthy saw the persecution of the gay and lesbian community under the Lavender Scare as well as the continued attack on Black radicalism. From the ashes of the destruction of the CSU also came the ascendency of former B-movie actor Ronald Wilson Reagan. Reagan, who had formerly served as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, would go on to administer a mighty blow against unions. In 1981, as U.S. president, he fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, locking them out of federal employment for life, employing strikebreaking tactics he may have rehearsed during his anti-communist tenure in Hollywood. The knock-on effects from the Red Scare in Hollywood would resonate for decades to come, setting back progressive trade unionism in the United States for generations of workers.

Today, we are witnessing a similar parallel: In tandem with the labor actions in Hollywood and elsewhere across the country, there is a new Red Scare heralding a burgeoning neo-fascism in the United States. Ron DeSantis’s “Stop Woke” campaign, the banning of critical race theory in Florida, Arkansas, and elsewhere, the persecution of the African People’s Socialist Party, Rick Scott’s “travel ban” for socialists traveling to Florida, bipartisan hysteria over the economic rise of China and the BRICS nations, as well as antisemitic tropes like the threat of “cultural Marxism” all point in this direction.

In Hollywood, specifically, we can look to right-wing hysteria over so-called “woke” films such as Barbie and other “culture war” trends perpetrated by pundits who flirt with, if not outright endorse, anti-Blackness, anti-trans ideology, and antisemitism—often in the same breath. The perceived threat of “wokeism” and “identity politics” bear a striking resemblance to the Red Scare tactics of the 1940s and 1950s, insofar as they function as coded attempts to discredit individuals and collectives alike by coding progressive politics as adjacent with Marxism or communism—only today, instead of Moscow, Beijing has become the primary boogeyman.

But this time, the tables may be turning. When Screen Actors Guild president Fran Drescher gave a rip-roaring speech dripping with the authority of class struggle this summer, nobody accused her of being a communist for speaking out against labor conditions. Likewise, Bryan Cranston, who portrayed Trumbo in a biopic of the same name, wasn’t labeled a “Communist dupe” when he delivered a fiery, pro-union speech in July.

And in a year of unprecedented labor actions throughout the nation, the Writers Guild of America’s (WGA) months-long strike, which secured better contracts for writers in a radical victory for labor last month, and the tentative agreement the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) just reached after 118 days on the picket lines, have highlighted the efforts of the working-class members of the film industry.

The efforts go far beyond the entertainment studios, too. In August, thousands of Los Angeles city workers engaged in a one-day strike to put pressure on Mayor Karen Bass. In recent months there have also been a hotel workers strike and job actions by Los Angeles Unified School District teachers. That’s why to talk about those struggling against the citadel of capital, disproportionately cited in Southern California, it’s important to understand that what is happening in Hollywood is part of a broader labor movement.

That’s why, though some onlookers, even on the political left, have not taken the Hollywood strikes seriously, to be dismissive of the gravity of the labor movement in Hollywood is to commit a fundamental political blunder. Tinseltown has a rich, though too often unacknowledged, history of class struggle that is intimately connected with the kickoff of Red Scare politics in the 1940s and 1950s. The CSU strike provides a sober reminder of how the violent proliferation of Red Scare hysteria and anti-labor sentiment in Hollywood in the middle of the 20th century were connected, and of how far the capitalist class is willing to take its moral panics.

As we heed the lessons of this previous era, it allows us to understand why the labor actions this time around—Hollywood culture workers, United Auto Workers, the 75,000 striking Kaiser employees, graduate students, contingent faculty, and other teachers across the country, and the others too numerous to mention—portend good signs to come for labor in the United States.

The post How Hollywood’s Black Friday Strike Changed Labor Across America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This May, an email landed in my inbox. The correspondent, who’d come across my new book on the John Birch Society, wanted to share how members of this far-right anticommunist group won control of his local Parent Teacher Association when he was in kindergarten at San Rafael Elementary.

This was early 1960s Pasadena, California, during the rise of the Birchers. What happened then and there was a story unfolding in many communities around the country.

In one way, the story was similar to the pressures that schools are seeing now. In recent years, parents and activists—who, in many cases, are the ideological inheritors of the Birchers—have succeeded in getting large swathes of the country to vet what is taught and read in classrooms, to decide which students can use which bathrooms, and to determine what gender pronouns teachers can use with their students.

But there is at least one profound difference between today and the 1960s: the ferocity of response to such pressure campaigns. While today’s culture warriors often get their way in the schools, the Birchers ultimately failed to capitalize on opportunities like the one in Pasadena.

Why? The counterattacks were too strong. The so-called guardrails protecting democracy were also resilient. When the Birchers made inroads in the media, libraries, and schools more than a half-century ago, they were often stopped, and pushed to the margins. In this Pasadena case, the letter-writer told me, a grassroots effort, which included his mom (who had no apparent history of political activism before this), came together to win back control of their PTA.

His email reminded me how much of the work countering the Birchers occurred out of sight, by parents opposing what they considered an intrusion on their liberties and on their children’s access to a robust progressive education.

It’s this kind of mass mobilization and resistance that’s needed now to defend such ideals as freedom of expression, pluralism, tolerance, and multiracial democracy in America.

The Birch Society was founded in 1958 by 12 white men, mostly Christian and wealthy, including oil and gas magnate Fred Koch, and ex-candy manufacturer Robert Welch, the group’s leader.

But it only exploded into the American consciousness in 1961, when reporters and political leaders revealed to the public that Welch had formed a secret anticommunist society that saw conspiracies proliferating inside the United States. The Birch Society, which numbered between 60,000 and 100,000 members at its height in the mid-1960s, sought to impose its version of Christian morality on American public life. This included giving parents veto power over sex education, giving students easier access to approved pro-“Americanist” texts, and minimizing teachings that they considered antithetical to traditional morality and culture.

In this local work, the Birch Society, while overwhelmingly male in its national leadership, was powered by grassroots efforts by women who used their status as moms to claim a moral order and impose it on schools and communities. Their methods are reminiscent of those used by today’s Moms for Liberty.

Sometimes, the Birchers could win even by losing, inserting their issues into the public square and pushing the conversation in a direction they wished. But more often, the Birchers and their allies lost their fights to take over PTAs and school boards, and to force libraries to stock shelves with conservative tracts. These defeats were fueled by the concerted mobilization of institutions, individuals, and elected officials devoted to repelling the Birch-backed assault on progressive education.

For instance, when Birch leader Laurence Bunker won a seat as a trustee of his local library in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Bunker’s own Unitarian pastor, apparently chafing at a radical’s ascent atop the library’s administration, decided to challenge him in the next election. He ultimately assembled a coalition that unseated Bunker.

In other cases, institutions and their leaders organized the resistance. When Birchers and members of the American Legion in Paradise, California, charged that a popular government teacher Virginia Franklin had immersed her pupils in communist ideas (she exposed them to the Quaker-led American Friends Service Committee), the community largely rallied behind Franklin. Her principal backed her, the school board cleared her of wrongdoing, the media painted her in a sympathetic light, and the courts later awarded her monetary damages in her lawsuit claiming defamation.

The relatively strong popular conviction that progressive education was a cornerstone of shoring up democracy also helped fend off the Birchers. This kind of education was venerated as a bulwark of democracy and individual rights against the ideas of fascism and communism. Progressive education had seemingly helped the United States survive the Great Depression and win World War II by building a corps of citizens who believed in the power of government to do good, felt devoted to their community, and contributed through military, federal, and volunteer service.

Such a broad-minded education was evinced by American philosopher John Dewey, who promoted his ideas in the early 20th century by establishing the Laboratory School in Chicago and publishing Democracy and Education. To imbue students with the values of democratic citizenship, they would be exposed to a range of ideas and perspectives, learn the importance of social equality and an informed citizenship, and explore both America’s greatest triumphs and its abject failures to live up to its ideals.

Though the Birchers never achieved the revolution in public education they hoped for, they did notch a handful of education-related wins. Notably, in 1962, they arguably secured their greatest victory when they helped elect Max Rafferty as California state superintendent of public instruction. Rafferty had drawn Birchers to his candidacy when he delivered a barnburner of a speech to the school board in the Los Angeles suburb of La Cañada, which borders Pasadena.

Titled “The Passing of the Patriot,” Rafferty’s address charged that the public schools were indoctrinating young minds in the poison of communism. The education system, he complained, was churning out a generation of “booted, side-burned, ducktailed, unwashed, leather-jacketed slobs, whose favorite sport is ravaging little girls and stomping polio victims to death.” Rafferty’s broadsides succeeded in getting voters to turn against the ideals of progressive education in favor of a curriculum that favored pro-American tutorials where students would learn to be “militant for freedom” and “happy in their love of country.”

Such a win showed how, using the banner of parental rights, state power could be deployed to enforce a set of norms and values across public institutions.  And that same playbook—or at least something that reads like the old Birch playbook—has allowed for the rise of an Orwellian regime of bureaucratic censorship today.

But, as emails like the one sent to me this spring demonstrate, organizing, voting, and activism can counter far-right efforts to control public education at the community level.

Championing the idea of progressive education, in the Dewey tradition, is part of the ongoing work of defending democracy. Disinformation, conspiracy theories, climate change denial, and economic and racial inequalities are rampant in the United States, making progressive education more relevant than ever.

It is needed, as well, to counter the declining trust in the nation’s democratic institutions and reject the growing intolerance toward people of color, LGBTQ rights, and immigrants.

This type of education can also help foster citizens who can tackle the country’s biggest problems. As one scholar put it, Dewey’s vision of a progressive education was to “produce an inquiring student who could change America.”

Though it is harder nowadays to use “sunlight” to expose the excesses of education extremists, it’s still possible to expose the radical nature of the project. If the extremism can be surfaced as an attack on the free exchange of ideas and facts, then some parents might be convinced to enter the fray to thwart the successors to the Birch movement.

The post A Mid-Century Playbook for Saving Progressive American Education appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A soldier stops him. “You can’t see Mao,” he says. “He’s dead.”

The worker returns the next day, and again asks for Mao. The same soldier turns him away: “You can’t see him. He’s dead.”

The third day, the worker returns, and insists: “I must see Chairman Mao.”

The soldier loses his temper. “I told you yesterday, and the day before that. Chairman Mao is dead. Dead! Dead! Dead!”

“I know,” says the worker, with a smile. “I just love hearing you say it.”
 

The author, seen here at age 5 in Hong Kong, where he and his family lived until abruptly moving to Beijing, after the normalization of U.S.-China relations. Courtesy of the Mathews family.

That is the first joke I remember learning. I was 6 years old when I committed it to memory and started retelling it.

You may say that a small child telling a joke like that is “not normal.” Then again, we’re seeing and hearing a lot these days that is “not normal.” It’s what we say when we see slippage in our democracies, when authoritarian leaders violate norms.

But that joke was more than normal for Joe Mathews, age 6. In fact, it was normalization.

From ages 5 to 7, I was a pint-sized participant in the creation of the modern relationship between the two most important nations on earth.

At the end of 1978, Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping announced what was called normalization—the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, after three decades of estrangement following the 1949 Communist revolution.

Normalization immediately opened up China to Americans.

So early in 1979, not long after Deng mounted a tour of the U.S. to introduce himself, I moved to Beijing, arriving on a plane with many American diplomats and their families. I had no official status. But I was the son of American journalists, Jay Mathews of The Washington Post and Linda Mathews of the Los Angeles Times, who were two of the first four U.S. newspaper reporters given visas to live and report in China.

It has been 40 years now since that fateful spring that put China, the U.S., and the world on a different path. The experience has never left me. Beijing is the first city I knew intimately, at least as well as a child can. The Chinese capital, during the years of 1979 and 1980, is where I first became aware of the outside world. And my time there left lasting and powerful impressions—about history, about hotels, about childhood, and especially about the real meanings of democracy, tyranny, and resistance.
 

The author’s parents, competing newspaper journalists, took him on assignments around China. This photo is from one such trip in 1979. Courtesy of the Mathews family.

Mine is a California family, tracing our heritage to Scotland and Ireland, but for nearly a century the joke has been that we are secretly Chinese. In the 1920s, my great-grandfather, the Naval Commander Raymond Corcoran, moved his wife and children, including my paternal grandmother, to the small Shandong Peninsula seaport of Chefoo (now Yantai), where he was posted. It was another delicate moment of transition in the history of colonization and foreign influence in China; the Germans were moving out, and the Japanese were moving in. So the Americans decided to step up their naval presence.

The Corcorans loved the place, in no small part because the Chinese treated them so well. As Americans, they were seen as a better class of barbarians—much nicer than the British and Japanese imperialists who had humiliated China in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

And so my grandmother and her siblings would eventually fill their California homes with Chinese antiques and stories of the Chinese people they had known, whom they often praised for their ingenuity at surviving poverty and China’s unenlightened rulers.

These family stories deeply influenced my father, who studied Mandarin and Chinese history in college, and then lobbied his editors at The Washington Post to send him to East Asia. In 1976, when I was 3, we moved to Hong Kong, where my mother worked first at the Asian Wall Street Journal and then at the L.A. Times (Yes, my parents competed against each other on the same beat—and yes, they are still married to each other, though that is another story).

In Hong Kong, I went to an American-run Montessori school, dodged the wild dogs in my neighborhood of Repulse Bay, and welcomed a baby brother, Peter.

But mostly we waited for normalization, which would open China to us. Nixon had gone to China in 1972, but turmoil in Chinese politics (including Mao’s death in 1976) and American politics (including Watergate) meant that the effort to normalize relations stalled. It wasn’t until the second half of 1978, when Deng rose to power, that the final talks necessary to reestablish diplomatic relations began. In a matter of months the U.S. agreed to Chinese demands that it abandon diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and the talks concluded quickly.

So quickly, in fact, that when we got permission to move, we left for Beijing before we’d found a place to live or work. So, in 1979, my parents made a highly consequential decision: to move our young family of four into a 15th floor suite in the Beijing Hotel.

There is no hotel quite like it. The Beijing Hotel was the city’s leading spot for international visitors. First opened in 1915, it was really two buildings—a modern tower with 17 floors of rooms, connected to an older wing, used mostly for events, with traditional Chinese lobbies and decorations.

The hotel was in the very center of the political universe, on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, next to the Forbidden City, and a short walk from Beijing’s world-famous monuments. From the window of our room, I could peer into Tiananmen Square and see the Great Hall of the People, from which the Communists ruled China.

My parents sought other housing in Beijing, but never found it. So the hotel—specifically Room 1532—became our home for the next two years. My parents also worked in the hotel, renting other rooms as their offices. They sometimes complained about raising two young children in a hotel, but my brother and I learned to appreciate the place—and rule it.
 

Lau Lin (right), a Chinese amah, or little mother, took care of the author (center) and his little brother in Hong Kong and then moved with the family to Beijing. Courtesy of the Mathews family.

In Kay Thompson’s classic children’s story, Eloise, a 6-year-old girl lives in The Plaza, the famed hotel on New York’s Central Park, and has the run of the place. She writes on the walls, wanders into strangers’ weddings, and tussles with the housekeeping staff, all while being chased by her English nanny.

My life in the Beijing Hotel was not so different than that.

The hotel had a very professional staff, and rules of comportment that they often recited to me. But I had just turned 6, and didn’t have time for rules.

So I rode my bicycle through the hotel halls, into the lobby, and all over the hotel’s older wing, despite many warnings to stop. My little brother sometimes joined me on his tricycle. We explored every stairwell and closet, raced on the elevators, attended events to which we were not invited, and commandeered empty meeting rooms and the hotel’s small pool hall for our games. We had too much energy to be controlled or confined for long, so the hotel staff—our uncles and aunties, as we called them—sought to pacify us, teaching us Chinese songs, playing with our Matchbox cars, and giving us 6-ounce cans of Coca-Cola (the tiny size was the only one available) or bottles of orange Chinese soda pop. Of course, the sugar only made us more energetic.

We may have been rowdy, but we were not a total nuisance. The hotel was full of important Americans traveling to China to check out new avenues of business. And I served a vital role as unofficial greeter, helping guests find their rooms and pointing the way to local attractions. Many of these early visitors to the Beijing Hotel were U.S. scientists, since Deng’s new Chinese administration had prioritized scientific and academic exchanges. I remember getting lessons in the lobby about black holes and supernovas from visiting American astronomers.

Our policing of the hotel also led to entanglements with American politicians, who raced to Beijing to build connections and help their donors pursue business opportunities. One day, my brother and I were racing our bikes down a hotel corridor when we sped into a large conference room. Peter collided with the leg of a man, who let out a loud “ouch” and fell onto the floor in pain. Our father was called to the scene, and we were made to apologize to the man, who introduced himself as Ed Koch, the mayor of Eloise’s hometown.

Technically, we were not unsupervised. In Hong Kong, my parents had hired Lau Lin, a local amah (the term means little mother), to cook, clean our apartment, and take care of us, and she bravely agreed to accompany us to Beijing. But Ah-Lin, as we called her, wasn’t always able to keep up with our hotel adventures.

She did focus on making sure we got fed—she felt I was too skinny (“Joe has no bottom,” she would complain, in English and her native Cantonese). When she wasn’t able to prepare food in the room (since it was a violation of hotel rules), she made sure we made frequent visits to the hotel dining room. The dining room was split—with Western-style meals served on one side, and Chinese food on another. We patronized both, and soon grew sick of the limited menus at each. I decided not to suffer in silence.

Then, as now, China was a country that suppressed free speech and dissent. But the authorities had foolishly left an opening: the guest book at the Beijing Hotel dining room. For most guests, it was a place to sign your name and let people know where you were from, but I seized it as a platform. Writing in block letters, I tore into the taste and warmth of the food, and the speed of the service, with a direct and undiplomatic American style. I critiqued nearly every meal in English, and a hotel staffer translated my comments into Chinese.

I got noticed. “Who is Joe Mathews?” asked one fellow diner and commenter. “This is rude,” commented another. Hotel management questioned my parents, who tried to stop me. But they had stories to file, and so I persisted. And I got results. Staffers started making dishes for me that were off the menu. They asked my opinion on changes. Not that it stopped me from criticizing. Eventually, the book was removed, and a 6-year-old future journalist learned his first lesson about democratic expression right there, in the heart of a communist dictatorship.

It would not be the last lesson.
 

The blond author and his redheaded brother were celebrities in central Beijing, where they used every kind of transportation to go where they pleased. Courtesy of the Mathews family.

The hotel was only one piece of my education. The streets of Beijing were quite another.

With Ah-Lin or my parents giving chase, I rode my bike all around our neighborhood, joining the thousands of Chinese on bikes (there were still relatively few cars). Before long, the capital’s center, both ancient and modern, felt utterly familiar.

I flew my kite in Tiananmen Square. My brother and I explored every inch of the nearby hutongs—the traditional alley-centered neighborhoods—and threw balls and toys against the walls of the Forbidden City. We joined the crowds lining up to visit the mausoleum that displayed Mao’s body. (“Peasant under glass,” was one expat joke I soon adopted.)

And our local playground was at the Temple of Heaven, constructed by the Yongle Emperor between 1406 and 1420. There I couldn’t help but notice the young and amorous local couples, who spent long afternoons displaying their affections publicly. What I came to understand at that playground has allowed me to brag ever since that I first learned about sex at the Temple of Heaven.

My brother and I were constantly approached by regular Chinese people. Some asked to touch our hair—I was very blonde at that age, and my brother had hair so red that it nearly matched the flag of the People’s Republic. And while Americans remember the “ping-pong” diplomacy that paved the way for Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, I practiced Wiffle ball diplomacy. My dad and I held endless games with a plastic ball and plastic bat, sometimes out at the Ming Tombs, the mausoleums that house Chinese emperors from the 15th and 16th centuries. When we played Wiffle ball in the hotel parking lot along the Avenue of Eternal Peace, hundreds of onlookers would watch, sometimes retrieving foul balls and even taking turns at bat.

Beijingers were nice to small American children, and I identified closely enough with the Chinese worldview that I made drawings of Soviet planes and rockets attacking the Great Wall, and being heroically fought off by Chinese on horseback. Deng’s anti-Soviet propaganda had thoroughly penetrated my consciousness; China fought a brief war with the Soviet-backed regime in Vietnam for less than a month in 1979.

But it wasn’t hard to find anger and conflict in the streets of the city. Fights were common. And arguments were frequent, especially in Beijing’s black markets, where Ah-Lin took me on shopping excursions. So many conversations ended in conflict, with one person declaring “I won’t stand for it” or “Wǒ bù huì zhīchí de,” that I started using the phrase myself.

Even a 6-year-old could see the link between people’s anger and their fear of authorities. So while my parents navigated China diplomatically, and my brother learned the language and customs at his Chinese government preschool, I fought back.

I refused to obey the commands of the omnipresent Chinese soldiers and police when they told me I couldn’t go here or there. I once got into trouble for banging my bicycle into the shin of a soldier who refused to let me back into the hotel. Soon, I was an unwavering opponent of tyranny, in all forms.

At my school, a converted garage at the U.S. Embassy, which I attended with 14 kids of American diplomats, I argued bitterly with the authoritarian principal. “Joe is the most insolent child I have ever known,” she wrote in a note to my parents. When they showed it to me, I replied that she too was pretty insolent—“whatever that means.”

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only person in Beijing willing to challenge dictators.
 

The author, age 6, in Nanjing at the Yangtze River Bridge. Courtesy of the Mathews family.

As they traveled the country reporting stories, my parents often took me along. I loved the lake in Hangzhou, a historical center of Chinese art and poetry, and the Yangtze River in Nanjing, perhaps best known to Westerners for Japanese atrocities in the 1930s. We vacationed in Beidaihe, the seaside resort favored by China’s leaders. And my dad even took me by train to Yantai, where we looked for the places where my grandmother had lived as a small child.

Sometimes, my parents used me as a decoy, hoping to avoid the Chinese government surveillance that was a fact of life. Drivers and translators who nominally worked for my parents were expected to report back to the government about their activities. So, Mom and Dad would announce they were taking me for a family outing, and instead we would visit a dissident.

I remember in particular a man named Xu Wenli, a light-fixture repairman who was publishing a pro-democracy magazine called the April 5th Forum. He had a 7-year-old daughter, Xingxing, who I liked to play with. Xu was a patriot who wanted his country to succeed. He was also cautious, and he never attacked the party’s leaders by name. But none of that saved him from being harassed and arrested by the authorities during those years.

Some of my clearest memories of Beijing involve accompanying my parents on their many visits to Democracy Wall. In 1978, at a street corner not far from the Beijing Hotel, citizens had commandeered a long wall to post messages about what had happened to themselves or their loved ones during the Cultural Revolution.

By 1979, these messages had grown more pointed, so that they included aspirations for China and democracy. I remember spending time standing there while my parents copied down the postings on the wall in their notebooks. I didn’t understand much, but I remember thinking that democracy must be something very important if people were willing to stand out in the cold to read about it, especially when wind storms flooded the air with dust from the Gobi Desert.

One man would go even further, using the wall to take on the regime directly.

Deng Xiaoping, as he ramped up his massive campaign to modernize China, had given a speech listing “four modernizations”: science, industry, agriculture, and defense. An electrician named Wei Jingsheng took to the wall to say that Deng had made a major omission: democracy, the “fifth modernization.”

“The leaders of our nation must be informed that we want to take our destiny into our own hands. We want no more gods or emperors. No more saviors of any kind,” Wei wrote. “Democracy, freedom and happiness are the only goals of modernization. Without this fifth modernization, the four others are nothing more than a new-fangled lie.”

I remember learning about Wei from my parents, and appreciating his love of challenging authority. “Dissent may not always be pleasant to listen to, and it is inevitable that it will sometimes be misguided,” he famously said. “But it is everyone’s sovereign right. Indeed when government is seen as defective or unreasonable, criticizing it is an unshirkable duty.”

To this day, I often find myself returning to the words of the essay he posted on the Democracy Wall, the “Fifth Modernization”:

What is true democracy? Only when the people themselves choose representatives to manage affairs in accordance with their own will and interests can we speak of democracy. Furthermore, the people must have the power to replace these representatives at any time in order to prevent them from abusing their powers to suppress the people. Is this possible? The citizens of Europe and the United States enjoy just this kind of democracy and could run people like Nixon, de Gaulle … out of office when they wished … In China, however, if a person so much as comments on the now‐deceased “Great Helmsman,” or “Great Man peerless in history,” Mao Zedong, the mighty prison gates and all kinds of unimaginable misfortunes await him.

There are even “certain people” who try to tell us that the Chinese people need a dictator and if he is more dictatorial than the emperors of old, it only proves his greatness. The Chinese people don’t need democracy, they say, for unless it is a “democracy under centralized leadership,” it isn’t worth a cent. Whether you believe this or not is up to you, but there are plenty of recently vacated prison cells waiting for you if you don’t.

Wei was right. In October 1979, he was convicted of publishing counter-revolutionary statements and leaking secret information. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison (and eventually released to the United States, where he still lives).

On January 16, 1980, Deng Xiaoping demanded cancelation of the constitutional right to hang wall posters and stated that the “four great” freedoms of “speaking out freely, airing views fully, holding great debates, and writing big character posters … have never played a positive role in China.”
 

Trips to the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs were routine in 1979 and 1980. The author played Wiffle ball at those locations, and along Chang’an Avenue, literally the Avenue of Eternal Peace, in central Beijing. Courtesy of the Mathews family.

A place so hostile to freedom is a tough place for journalists to work. Eventually, China—and hotel living—wore on my parents and their kids. By 1981, we were back in California. Since then, we have mostly watched China from afar, though my dad did go to Beijing in 1989 to report firsthand on the massacre in the very same neighborhood where I once rode my bike and played Wiffle ball.

As an adult, I’ve visited China as a tourist, even staying in the room that was our home at the Beijing Hotel. But I’m not sure I would want to work there. The place is awesome and maddening, paradoxically demonstrating both the infinite potential and the definite limits of human imagination. How could anyone who was there at the time of normalization have imagined exactly how good and how bad things would now get?

Massive advances in economic and technological growth have pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty. Today’s Beijing is literally unrecognizable. And Yantai, which had 65,000 people when my grandmother lived there and 225,000 when I visited in 1980, is now home to more than 6.5 million.

Even less conceivable is the unprecedented technological breadth of today’s Chinese police state, and the rise of another dictatorial figure, Xi Jinping, who engages in mass purges and violates norms while fashioning himself as the new Mao.

Of course, China isn’t the only place experiencing changes that once seemed unimaginable. My own country’s wealth, and power, and technology also have grown beyond expectations. And our democratic norms have withered with a mind-boggling speed and force. American government and American businesses have fashioned a surveillance state far more intrusive than the flesh-and-blood one that spied on my parents back in 1979.

Today’s conventional wisdom is that China and the United States are competitors, two very different powers fighting over control of the world. But from where I live, in California, the two countries and their leaders seem all too much alike. Xi and Trump both embrace nationalism, xenophobia, and conspiracy theories in service of extending their power. Both offer slogans and relentless propaganda. Both bully their neighbors.

And while both men talk about dreams, both wallow in false nostalgia. Trump wants to take us back to a whiter America and build his own Great Wall, while Xi suggests reviving the Zhou dynasty, which lasted 800 years, concluding two centuries before the birth of Christ.

I can’t shake the past, either. With everything going on in America now, I find myself thinking about the China I knew as a kid. The anger and bitterness in American life today feels familiar to this onetime Beijing boy. So do the plaintive pleas for democracy, scrawled on every available surface.

And so does the citizen’s conviction that challenging tyranny is an unshirkable duty that you can’t abandon until you’re absolutely sure that the tyrant is dead, dead, dead.

The post What Communist China Taught a 6-Year-Old American Boy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Global domination was indeed Moscow’s declared aim. The issue, however, was whether this goal was at all practicable.

The Red Scare blended neatly with popular hostility to mass immigration in America, particularly against a surge of Jews fleeing the anti-Semitic heartlands of Eastern Europe. Responding to hostility, many Jews embraced the inclusive internationalist ideals of Communism rather than the outlandish idea of building a Jewish state in the deserts of British-controlled Arab Palestine. But they were a minority, drawn in by radical idealism and anti-fascism. And the American opposition to wider Jewish immigration from these areas was clearly colored by racism, especially the anti-Semitism of the time.

Although there was little justification for the scare-mongering, the hysteria was enough to spur the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which put a halt to the inflow of immigrants without visas. Fears began to dissipate. The 1927 execution of Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born anarchist immigrants accused of murder on doubtful evidence, marked the high tide of the irrational anti-red (and mostly anti-foreigner) hysteria in American life.

Ironically, it was around this time that real dangers actually began to emerge. But, having cried wolf once too often, doomsayers then faced an uphill task through the ‘30s trying to convince the government and the American public that Communist threats of any kind actually existed.

Fear of Communism and fear of Soviet espionage were closely entangled because a few members of the miniscule American Communist Party were, in fact, involved in spying for Moscow. Most adherents had no idea this kind of thing was going on—the practice was confined to the shadows, restricted to a few specially chosen for what they had to offer. But, as was the case with Communist Parties elsewhere in the world, those recruited saw it as their duty to serve. And recent archival revelations from Moscow show just how persistent the Kremlin was in its attempts to penetrate the American system.

Initially the civilian branch of Soviet intelligence—OGPU, then NKVD—had little luck recruiting American spies. Yuri Markin (codename Oskar), the illegal “rezident”—as the Russians called their station chiefs—from from 1932-1934, was murdered by persons unknown, the victim of a violent encounter in a New York bar. His replacement, Boris Bazarov (codenames, Kin, Da Vinci, Nord), worked in tandem with the ‘legal’ rezident (who was under diplomatic cover), Pyotr Guttseit (codename Nikolai). He had much better luck, including recruiting sources with direct access to the State Department and one connected to President Franklin Roosevelt’s inner circle. But the successful spy was recalled to Moscow in 1937, where he became a victim of Stalin’s paranoid purge of those seen as connected to foreigners (mass executions that included even George Kennan’s dentist at the American embassy). His successor, Ishak Akhmerov (codename Yung), took over and married a distant relative of Communist Party chief Earl Browder. Browder himself ensured that ties to Soviet intelligence became indistinguishable from Party work; his wife, Kitty (‘Gipsy’) Harris, worked for the Soviets and assisted (and slept with) their British spy Donald Maclean in London and then Paris in the late ‘30s.

The most successful operation at that time, however, came from a group of covert operatives organized by the American agriculturalist Harold Ware. The ring included Alger Hiss, Donald, and other federal officials who were convinced that the need to confront the threat from fascism eclipsed all other loyalties. They believed that the road to socialism was inevitable, and that the socialist-leaning policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal were merely the taste of things to come. This operation came under Soviet military intelligence, known as the Fourth Directorate, the NKVD’s main rival. Although their infiltration went deep, none of it added up to much—it was simply ‘music of the future’.

The stakes were raised, however, when the U.S. entered WWII in December 1941—and the Americans joined the British to develop the atomic bomb. Soviet focus on scientific and industrial intelligence (NTR), which had its own section within the NKVD, switched abruptly from London to Washington. Though intelligence boss Lavrenty Beria dragged his feet on the issue, the NTR foresaw the significant role the bomb would play and pushed it to the forefront of their priorities. Once the directive was set by Stalin in 1942, Soviet efforts knew no limits. Operation Enormoz, directed at uncovering the secret of atomic bomb construction, took high priority. The Kremlin was looking ahead to the aftermath of war. The balance of power could ultimately depend who had the bomb. And those who volunteered for the cause were putting their lives at risk, as they were soon to find out.

The American authorities had absolutely no idea what the Russians were up to until very late in the game. Good liberals scoffed at the idea that Moscow could be spying on a wartime ally, even as some of their best friends were actually secret members of the Communist Party and spies for Russia. The Roosevelt administration declined to follow up on tips about suspected infiltration. It wasn’t until the very public defection of a Soviet Embassy cipher clerk, who snuck out documentation showing the magnitude of Soviet atomic espionage that had been going on, that the issue finally came to a head. Soviet spy networks were quickly rooted out. The consequences proved cataclysmic for Americans caught serving the Communist cause. Among those swept up were Julius Rosenberg, an engineer who handed Moscow classified information about the U.S. atomic program, and his wife Ethel (against whom there was little solid evidence).

By the early 1950s, when the Rosenbergs were executed, Washington was again gripped with widespread hysteria about Communist penetration of American society and government.

The Russians, meanwhile, had been closing down all operations in the late 1940s in order to save their agents; and only well after the death of Stalin in 1953 were they able to begin seriously rebuilding their networks in America. But these networks never acquired the significance they had once had. Atomic espionage in the United States, carried out by misguided idealists who saw in the Soviets a progressive force, proved the high point of Russian intelligence operations targeting America.

Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, followed by the Soviet intervention in Hungary, destroyed any remaining allure Moscow may have held for young idealists in the West. Thus, although President Lyndon Johnson dearly hoped to uncover Moscow’s clammy hand at work behind the protest movement against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, no amount of effort by the FBI and CIA could uncover anything of significance. International communism, whatever challenges it still posed overseas, no longer posed the threat of creating a fifth column at home.

Though the Russians did have dramatic success in penetrating both the FBI and CIA in the 1980s, it didn’t impact the American psyche as they would have two decades earlier. Yes, they were serious security lapses, but they involved lone, disaffected or greedy double agents like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen. There was nothing idealistic, nothing connected to a larger Soviet appeal, in their betrayal.

By the 1980s, the issue of socialism in American political life had become completely divorced from the issue of relations with the Soviet Union. And as the USSR dissolved from within and came to an end in 1992, the long dark shadow it cast over America finally passed forever.

Even when revelations of post-Soviet Russian spying reemerged in more recent years; most Americans just shrugged their shoulders, or met the news with a nostalgic chuckle and a mention of the good old Cold War days. Other challenges, most prominently 9/11 and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, had reconnected domestic internal security concerns with international relations in an even more dramatic manner. And as the generations move on, distant memories grossly exaggerated fears recede from our shared consciousness.

The post The (Actual) Communist Agents Who Lurked Among Us appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Things often sound true when they rhyme. Growing up in Canada, I would have agreed with Carnevale. I would have even agreed with politicians like the governor of North Carolina, Patrick McCrory, who sees university primarily as job training. I had a Romanian immigrant’s relentless pragmatism, having been raised to think that medicine and law were the only acceptable career options in life. Although I was a bookish teenager, I never thought I could study literature or history or philosophy. At some level I felt these topics were pleasant but useless fluff, nice as hobbies but not worth thousands of dollars in tuition and four years of my life.

At the University of Toronto I fell in love, against my better judgment, with English literature, and switched majors. I felt like a rebel reading Paradise Lost and learning Old English grammar instead of doing something that would earn me a job after graduation. But although I made the switch to the liberal arts, I couldn’t help but feel that the humanities were still somewhat superfluous. This opinion began to change the summer when I was 20 years old. In search of my roots, I went to Bucharest and worked at the Canadian embassy there. That job was the beginning of a practical education in the importance of the humanities.

I learned, for example, how much depends on a word. One of my tasks was to translate interviews with Romanians who wanted to marry Canadians. The immigration agent needed to know if the couple was in love or if the relationship was faked. It was essential that I be scrupulous, adding nothing and taking nothing away. Liars, I learned, often make up romantic stories about their betrothed but cannot bring themselves to say “love.” One woman was allowed to emigrate because, pressed to explain why she wanted to marry her middle-aged, average-looking fiancé, she said merely that he was a good man and she loved him.

During another interview with a prospective fiancée, the Canadian agent pushed a pile of letters and cards towards me and said, “Look over these and see if they seem romantic to you.” My critiques of Romantic poetry in university had made no difference to those long-gone poets, but now the woman whose future I would help to decide watched me as I read over her correspondence with her boyfriend. “It isn’t particularly romantic,” I declared, with all my 20 years of life experience behind me, “but they seem to know each other well.” Her visa was approved.

The more important lesson, though, I learned secondhand. One day, as I was running background checks and doing paperwork, my co-worker told me the story of her in-laws’ marriage. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the communist government of Romania carried out a massive program of re-education and extermination of the country’s cultural elites. Artists, intellectuals, lawyers, politicians, and priests were put in political prisons and work camps. In a notorious experiment at the Pitești prison, prisoners—many of them university students in the humanities—were “re-educated” using physical as well as psychological torture. Guards beat and subjected them to extreme cold and hunger. They were made to eat their own excrement, and, worst of all, to torture each other. My colleague’s father-in-law, then a student of literature, was one such prisoner.

In order to maintain his sanity, the young man turned to his education. He knew French, his cellmate knew English, so they spent their captivity teaching one another their foreign languages. After his release, the student was forced to work in a factory, where he met a woman who had also studied literature and been imprisoned as a result. Neither could marry people with clean records for fear of ruining their “files” with the government, so they married each other. Their apartment in Bucharest became a kind of salon, with artists and writers always coming and going. This man, who had learned English in a jail cell, ultimately became a literary translator of English poetry.

When I heard this story, I understood that the stereotype of the fluffy, useless liberal arts was a lie. If the study of literature or history were really that pointless, a government trying to control the minds of its subjects would not go to the trouble of putting humanities students and professors in jail. For educated prisoners, the love of language, art, and scholarship was no mere hobby. It was a lifeline, sometimes the only thread tying them to their identities, their dignity, their shredded sense of humanity. Nothing could be more practical.

Years later, when a new wave of cutbacks in higher education led to reports of another humanities “crisis,” I decided to find out how much of the oral history I heard at the embassy had been written down. I read a dozen Romanian prison memoirs, all of them published after the 1989 revolution. Each one testified to the power of the liberal arts—especially literature and foreign languages—to help individuals maintain sanity and a sense of self in conditions designed to destroy them.

The memoirs taught me how common it was for prisoners to teach each other languages. Constantin Giurescu, a historian, learned Hungarian from one prisoner and taught it to another; meanwhile, he practiced his English, German, and French. The mathematician and Holocaust survivor Egon Balas held language sessions during captivity to practice English, Russian, French, and German. In prison, Arnold Schwefelberg recalled the Hebrew he had previously learned to the point where he could think in it fluently. Dan Brătianu and his fellow prisoners were tormented by lice, for which they received DDT in glass bottles, so they covered the bottles in spit, rubbed them with soap, and sprinkled the DDT on top. They could scratch up to four hundred words on this makeshift writing surface, which they used to teach each other foreign vocabulary. Later, some of the prisoners who had learned English from Brătianu became professional translators.

Many prisoners survived by recalling poetry they had learned in school or by writing their own. The artist Lena Constante learned French prosody by remembering lines of poetry, scanning and analyzing them, and then composing her own verse in French. Schwefelberg “wrote” 50 to 60 poems and a play, some of which he committed to paper after release. Inmates used Morse or other tapping codes to compose poems, often finishing each other’s lines. They also communicated essential information by quoting poetry, guessing that the guards would miss the point. Prisoners formed study groups, recalling the plots of novels and teaching each other history from memory. Forced into a program of “re-education,” they created their own university instead.

Being an immigrant once made it difficult for me to imagine studying the humanities. Going home to Romania—both physically and through books—helped me understand the value of the liberal arts, one that goes far beyond job prospects and starting salaries after graduation. We have been taught to think of the liberal arts as unnecessary and wasteful, or in Ronald Reagan’s words, “intellectual luxuries that perhaps we could do without.” Memoirs of the Romanian gulag showed me what a dangerous lie this is. Educated political prisoners drew on rich inner resources to preserve their sanity and their spirits. They used their knowledge to help their fellow inmates survive as well. Their experiences reveal what the attack on the humanities really is. It is an attack on the ability to think, criticize, and endure in crisis, and its virulence betrays how vital the liberal arts are. The political rhetoric against the humanities exposes what is most important in our education, even as it attempts to destroy it.

The post “Frivolous” Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Critics of the president’s opening to Cuba accuse Obama of appeasing the Castro regime, but they missed the historic significance of the trip.

When Obama went on Cuban TV and radio to say that he’d made the visit to “bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas,” he might as well have been burying the nation’s virulently anti-American regime, not just Washington’s outdated policies.

Obama’s visit did more to spotlight the truly heinous nature of the Castro regime than a half-century of non-engagement ever did. It was moving to watch the American president, at the head of a willing and eager trade delegation, tell Cuba’s trapped youth he hopes they become more connected to the outside world. It was moving to watch how the American president deftly shamed the grumpy elderly Cuban dictator Raúl Castro into addressing reporters’ questions about human rights at what Cuban officials had planned to be a stilted and scripted press conference.

Obama’s words and his very presence in Havana spoke loud and clear to the Cuban people: America is not your enemy, or your problem. But you-know-who is.

For decades, the Castros, along with the right-wing exiles who’ve long insisted on a U.S. embargo, made Washington out to be the perfect scapegoat for the regime’s brutality and poor governance. Obama has said “no más” to that tired script. If Congress follows the president’s lead and lifts the embargo (a failed and foolish departure from America’s belief in the subversive power of engaging other dictatorships around the world), the Communist regime will be deprived of its entire self-justifying narrative.

Obama’s trip to Havana, the historical capital of Latin America’s anti-Americanism, came at a poignant time when that revolutionary leftist worldview is in full retreat across the hemisphere. Venezuela is fast becoming a failed petrostate, where people are turning towards the anti-Chavista opposition and away from dreams of an anti-U.S. Bolivarian South American order. In Bolivia and Ecuador, too, the left is losing its grip on power. And Brazil’s Labor Party is engulfed in an existential political crisis.

Obama’s second stop on his Latin victory lap last week, Buenos Aires, was a full-on celebration of the fact that Argentina voted its leftist Peronists out of office. At his press conference with the new conservative Argentine President Mauricio Macri (a man quite comfortable with taking questions from reporters), Obama could not have been more effusive about the shift in that nation’s orientation. He said Argentina’s historic transition was seeing the country “reassume its historic leadership role in the region,” implicitly bashing the previous Peronist governments that aligned themselves with Cuba and Venezuela and against Washington and free markets. Obama also addressed a Cold War remnant by acknowledging some U.S. complicity in the human rights abuses committed by that nation’s 1970s military dictatorship, and pledging to declassify more U.S. government documents from that era.

What’s most satisfying about this weakening of the destructive Cold War left in Latin America is that it is accompanied, if not enabled, by a widespread rejection of the idea that the United States is the enemy. The levels of distrust and hostility towards the “empire” to the north are at historical lows across the region.

The decline of anti-Americanism is notable in the most important Latin American partner to the United States, the nation across our southern border. Anti-Americanism used to be a staple of Mexican political discourse. But at a recent conference in Mexico City, Gerardo Maldonado of the think tank CIDE cited polls from 2014 in which 49 percent of Mexicans say they “admire” the U.S.; 32 percent are “indifferent”; and only 14 percent view us poorly. The Pew Global Attitudes Survey in 2015, for its part, found that 66 percent of Mexicans had a favorable view of the U.S., compared to 65 percent of respondents in the U.K.

Andrew Paxman, a historian at CIDE, explained that what he calls traditional “gringofobia” in Mexico—a form of xenophobia that demonizes Americans, especially its political and business leaders, as culturally inferior imperialists who can be blamed for most of Mexico’s woes—dates to the 19th century, but has been surprisingly absent from Mexican politics of late. Paxman credits greater cross-border engagement as the demystifying balm. The explosion in bilateral trade post-NAFTA and the constant movement of millions of Mexican workers back and forth across the border, spreading word of what the U.S. is really like, have helped strengthen feelings of trust, understanding, and friendship.

There is a specter clouding this triumphant moment in U.S.-Latin relations, of course, and that is Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. Trump’s xenophobic and bombastic rhetoric is a dream come true for the beleaguered anti-American left in Latin America, whose leaders see in the candidate a fellow authoritarian populist with a recognizable style. Trump’s rambling rallies—with their mix of picaresque humor, vague promises of great things to come, and menacing bullying of media and opponents—are reminiscent of Hugo Chávez at his most entertaining.

For Mexicans, Trump’s hateful anti-Mexican rhetoric poses a real test of their newfound trust in the U.S. Paxman says he is starting to see an uptick in gringophobic language in Internet memes and opinion columns. A couple of weeks ago there was an editorial in Excélsior, a major Mexican daily, entitled “That’s How They See Us in the United States,” which falsely claimed that Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric was shared by most of the candidates.

And Paxman says that it’s already typical among cartoonists to draw Trump with a swastika: “If he’s elected, a common reaction here will be ‘Americans can’t be trusted—they elected a Nazi.’” And that could have a spillover effect in Mexican politics, according to Paxman, giving the leftist perennial presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador an opening in the 2018 elections to attack the current governing consensus for pro-American openness and pro-market reforms. His message, Paxman believes, could well become: “Why are we aligning ourselves with a country that hates us? Why are we letting those who hate us control our oil?”

That would be an appealing message for the desperate left throughout Latin America. Indeed, if Donald Trump wins the election next November, it will be a time for anti-American leaders in the region to take a victory lap, and to thank their lucky stars for their improbable reversal of fortune.

The post How Latin America’s Left Could Lose Their Scapegoat appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Cuba has long been such a titillating no-go zone for American travelers. Never mind that hordes of Canadians and Europeans have been going to Cuba for decades, for Americans the Caribbean island nation has been off-limits since the Kennedy presidency. If you didn’t have relatives there, going to Cuba has thus amounted to making a statement, either of cool defiance or serious purpose, since only certain types of visitors could obtain a license from the U.S. government to go. (Technically, the license is to spend U.S. currency there.)

Even better, going to Cuba has been risqué without being all that risky. Nobody is going to hurt you like they might in Yemen or Nigeria. Street crime is virtually nonexistent and your biggest danger was from the guy at José Martí Airport who might stamp your U.S. passport right off the flight from Cancun and leave you vulnerable to a hefty fine for “trading with the enemy” when you get back home.

President Obama’s trip to Havana this week marks the end for this status-conferring ritual—and winsome party story—available to white-collar subversives who relish the forbidden fruit. After all, what’s trailblazing and salacious about following in the footsteps of a trade delegation that included members of Congress, and CEOs from companies like Marriott looking to make deals?

This is where I get to boast that I went to Cuba last summer as part of the last wave of American travelers to jump over the knee-high barriers to see the island before it gets re-colonized by U.S. corporate interests. But here’s a confession you won’t hear from everyone who peeked into the locked box: What I saw there was deeply sad. If Cuba occupied a special place in the imagination of the American thrill-seeker, it is a place that deserves to die.

Cuba in the late-embargo period resembled a giant work of fiction. The jet that took me there from Miami (I went on a scholastic visa) was operated by a charter company but painted with the livery of American Airlines. The notes I traded my dollars for were Cuban convertible pesos—the CUCs or “kooks” used by foreigners and the rich—a luxury currency pegged to the U.S. dollar. Communist iconography was limited to statues and a few obligatory billboards complaining about the blockade. Nobody I met under the age of 60 expressed any zeal, let alone fondness, for the ongoing “revolution.” The entire country felt like a plantation run for the personal benefit of the Castro family.

A curious fact about Cuba: Literacy is among the highest in the world, at 99.7 percent. But there is almost nothing around to read, not even approved dogma. Bookstores are rare in Havana and almost nonexistent everywhere else. The only newspaper, Granma, is distinguished by its thinness and its utter lack of anything interesting to say. Virtually nobody sits on park benches reading, as if the activity were shameful. And of course there are no electronic tablets. There is barely any Internet.

The working fleet of Harry Truman-era Detroit cars remains on display, and the food is just as scarce and crappy as the guidebooks warn, but even more prevalent is the double-mindedness required of any individual to get along in a repressive society. Cubans behaved one way in public and another behind closed doors. “We live a lie here,” one woman told me in a city on the southern coast. “Nobody believes in the rhetoric. But we have to go along with it.” The bifurcation of the mind is a long-term national illness.

The most common complaint (quietly) expressed throughout Cuba is the lack of any reward whatsoever for imagination or hard work. You may labor for years on a project and still be forced to accept a monthly wage of $15 per month, with bare nutritional staples. Education, housing, and health care are virtually free, but with a lifetime guarantee of no hope for advancement or distinction. Being Cuban with an imagination is a particular kind of torture. Labor is truly alienated here, though not in the way Karl Marx intended.

The names of Raúl or Fidel Castro are rarely spoken aloud; a common gesture when referring to the government is to stroke an unseen beard. In the absence of a successful revolution, the people found personal release in sex—“the only thing Fidel couldn’t nationalize,” goes the old joke—and turned infidelity and speed-flirtation into national games. Tourists wielding dollars need not look far to find a desperate prostitution trade, both of the conventional variety and of the unspoken expectation of a morning “gift.”

Old Havana is undeniably charming but only because it is poor and somewhat hopeless, full of spontaneous scenes that look like a Gershwin opera unfolding under the balconies of 18th-century Spanish townhouses, their fading parlors lit with harsh shadeless lamps.

Walking through the city at night under arcades splashed with shades of ebony and maroon and seeing dozens of alleys and passageways stemming from a single block, each leading to new bad rooms, is to see a real-life 1959 film noir improbably preserved less than 90 miles from the Florida Keys. But Cuba exists in this state of functioning ruin because of the selfishness of its leadership, the autism of its official politics, and the complicity of shortsighted U.S. diplomacy. If you’re a tourist, the place is a grotesque amusement park, with the theme of a totalitarian state.

An entire generation of Cubans have been forced to squander their life’s possibilities under an oppressive system hostile to progress or personal initiative. The exodus to Florida stood as a lesson in cold Darwinism, for it seems likely that America took in many of the most daring personalities who were willing to risk their all.

Memories of a blockaded Cuba will linger before they fade entirely, before Cuba becomes like a Costa Rica of open borders and consumerist values. While the crowds of ordinary American visitors should be aware they are treading into a special place in its twilight days, their journey should also come with a mindfulness of just how contorted and artificial the mid-20th-century Cuban distinctiveness was, and what a high price in human potential was paid for it.

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There are plenty of reasons for China’s once-exuberant stock market to be in a slump. The underlying economy’s growth rate is slowing down. The yuan is losing some of its value as it is allowed to trade more freely and become a legitimate global currency. The yuan’s legitimacy is good for the country in the long term, but makes Chinese investors feel poorer in the short term and encourages them to take their money out of the country and invest in other currencies. At the same time, many Chinese investors, both individuals and companies, have been burned in recent years by their investments in other emerging markets. Beijing’s crackdown on corruption at state enterprises and among party officials and their business cronies has also accelerated capital flight, as people are eager to take their money (including ill-gotten gains) out of the country and invest in safer harbors (say, California real estate). Finally, geopolitical uncertainties like North Korea’s attempts to develop a hydrogen bomb test and Middle East tensions don’t help inspire investor confidence.

So things came to a head in the first week of the year, as Chinese regulators sought to impose some order on (if not slam the brakes on) their stock market selloff. On Thursday, a newly designed “circuit-breaker” shut down the markets for the day after the stock index had plummeted 7 percent in a mere 29 minutes. U.S. markets also have so-called circuit breakers to ensure that wild swings in markets don’t take on a life of their own due to algorithm-triggered trading. But the U.S. market circuit breakers aren’t as quick to intervene, and don’t disrupt trading for as long.

This interruption of China’s markets on Thursday captured much of the attention last week, as did all the news that made investors jittery in the first place. Less attention was paid to what might have been the main culprit of the week’s financial chaos: a time bomb set by China’s Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) back in July of 2015.

Last summer was a major wake-up call for Chinese investors and global markets that real trouble was brewing in the Chinese economy. As the Shanghai Composite Index fell from its peak of 5166 on June 12, 2015, to 3507 on July 8, the CSRC tried to calm the market by banning major shareholders, corporate executives, and directors (with stakes exceeding 5 percent) from selling stakes in companies listed on the exchange for six months. That six-month ban expired, as scheduled, last Friday, at the end of a week already marked by frenetic selling.

It’s human nature to want to avoid bad things from happening, but outlawing selling in financial markets always backfires. Countries often impose exchange controls to avoid too much money leaving the country (think Argentina in recent years), or declare bank “holidays” to stop everyone from withdrawing their savings at once (think Greece last summer). What invariably happens, absent some quick fix to the underlying crisis of confidence, is that people only become more anxious and unsettled, increasing the urge to sell, and run.

A key to understanding the psychology of any market is that no one wants to be the last to sell, to be left holding the proverbial bag. So when you ban major shareholders, corporate executives and directors from selling stakes for six months, and everyone else knows the first day they can sell any shares again is on Friday, what do you suppose will happen on the days leading up to that Friday? It’s like marking the perfect storm on the calendar for a certain date, and triggering the panicked herd effect in advance. (It was bad luck for regulators that they kicked the can last summer to a week that already got off to a bad start.)

The circuit breaker that intervened as a result of all that selling is also a bad idea. Why? Most investors (especially Chinese investors) think of trading stocks as gambling, and the stock market is like a casino. If the casino owner tells you that it shuts its door any time the house loses, what will the gamblers do? They grab their money and run! There is a sense of honor among all those at the gambling table, and part of that honor is the mutual assurance that you can take your chips and cash them in whenever you want. The CSRC was quick to announce after Thursday that it will suspend its new counterproductive stock market circuit breaker, which was a good move even though it reinforced a sense that regulators are simply winging it day to day.

China, to be fair, had imported some of these restrictive measures from Western markets. We have circuit breakers too, and when companies first go public, U.S. markets also impose “lock-up” periods during which insiders can’t sell their stock. But Chinese markets have imported these concepts with excessive zeal, before they have established the credibility or transparency of Western markets. In hindsight, CSRC should not have banned major shareholders to sell any stakes, but could have set a time schedule for them to sell, say, no more than 5 percent of their stakes in each month. At least that would have smoothed things out.

There remains a larger overarching challenge for China’s leadership, and it isn’t clear that this is one they can conquer within the constraints of their political system. And that challenge is to accept a basic truth facing market-based economies plugged into the global economy: There will be down days, and pretending there won’t be, or can’t be, will only make people more anxious, and make things worse.

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Of course, it is hard to compare anywhere else to China given the sheer scale of the People’s Republic and its transformation. And yet, much like Mexico in the 1990s, China has long been ruled by a one-party dictatorship that has outgrown its ideological purity (all lip service aside) in favor of a widely acclaimed technocratic pragmatism. If there is a social contract in China, it boils down to the government telling its people: You all pretend to be communists, and so will we; but we’ll actually allow you to become wealthier by not being real communists, so long as you don’t rock the boat and play along.

It’s all very reminiscent of Mexico’s seven-decade rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa called the PRI’s run “the perfect dictatorship” because of the regime’s institutionalized nature, which transcended any one individual leader and its original revolutionary ideology, and ensured a peaceful succession of a new president every six years, or “sexenio.”

And like China in recent years, Mexico in the early 1990s was widely praised for having a highly capable team of technocrats running its economic policymaking and promising growth, stability, and a rising standard of living.

Mexico’s ruling technocracy was much admired outside the country. Many of the gushing news articles about Mexico written in the early 1990s, around the time of the North American Free Trade Agreement, sound very much like those written about China in the past decade. Forbes gushed, in typical fashion: “You can’t any longer think of Mexico as the Third World.” (In the 1960s, there had been a similar bubble in commentary about Mexico, at a time when the country did post China-like growth rates.)

Lost in all the rosy pronouncements about Mexico’s economy was any serious analysis of how people’s rising living standards and expectations would affect their nation’s political evolution. Indeed, there was very little acknowledgment that there may be a political and democratic evolution—as opposed to a merely economic one.

The same void exists now with China—even though the trend lines are remarkably similar to what Mexico went through leading up to its transformation in 2000 to a multiparty democracy. Ever since Mikhail Gorbachev launched his ill-fated glasnost policy for greater transparency and openness in the late 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party has been obsessively studying the fall of the USSR in order to escape the same fate. At his first meeting as president at Beidaihe, Xi Jinping made a point of referring to the errors of the Soviet Communist Party, and those of Gorbachev in particular, as examples to avoid.

President Xi might do well to study the Mexican case instead, given that today’s Chinese Communist Party has much more in common with the PRI than it did with the Soviet Communist Party. Where the Chinese Communist Party has its Three Represents, the PRI extolled its three sectores: labor, business chambers, and peasants. In both cases, the governments strived to maintain control, order, and stability on behalf of drama-wary societies that had experienced too much tumult throughout history.

In the six years I lived in China, I would very often have a feeling of déjà-vu: Life in China was exhilarating, mind-boggling, frustrating at times. But amidst the sense of novelty, there was a frequent sense of having seen it all before.

The regulations forbidding foreign words on billboards in China reminded me of the TV ads that used to air in Mexico, making fun of people who used Anglicisms and exhorting us to defend the Spanish tongue. The driving restrictions to reduce pollution in Beijing brought to mind Mexico City’s program of Hoy No Circula, which bans your car from the road one day of the week.

Price, foreign exchange, and press controls were also familiar, surreal contradictions in a country stuck between its revolutionary heritage and its opening to the capitalist world. So, too, were all its huge and inefficient state-owned enterprises.

A smattering of tiny, state-sanctioned opposition parties in China give the impression of political plurality, much like they did in the PRI’s heyday in Mexico. Growing up in Mexico, it was hard to keep up with the various small parties sponsored by the PRI to give the appearance of democracy: the Green Party, the Labor Party, two different Socialist Parties, the Democratic Party, even a Communist Party and several parties with the word revolutionary in their name. China’s roster of parties includes no fewer than five with the word democratic or democracy in their names, all of them of course subservient to the Communist Party.

In both societies, I was struck, too, by the cocky rhetoric toward the United States—including claims of holding the upper hand in the bilateral relationship. In the eyes of the PRI, the U.S. was supposedly beholden to Mexico because of our deep oil reserves, as if we really had a choice about exporting our oil; Chinese leaders like to boast about their trillions in U.S. treasury bonds, as if they had any other options for where to sanitize their currency. Both governments also had a foreign policy based on complicity with rogue states—Mexico and Cuba, China and North Korea.

And in both today’s China and the Mexico of two decades ago, small outbursts of organized dissension—in Chiapas and in China’s far western provinces—are treated as existential threats to the overriding narrative. And high-profile arrests carried out in the name of cracking down on corruption are a preferred manner of taking down political adversaries.

There were three seminal events in Mexico’s transition to democracy that have had recent echoes in China, and should thus keep Beijing’s leaders awake at night.

One was the earthquake that devastated Mexico City in 1985, killing thousands and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. The tragedy marked the beginning of the end for the PRI, laying bare the party’s corruption, lack of transparency and inefficiency. Mexicans, disenchanted with their government’s inability to enforce safer building codes or respond more forcefully to the calamitous aftermath of the disaster, began organizing themselves to take care of their neighbors and their capital city.

The horrible Sichuan earthquake of 2008 may come to be seen as a similar watershed in modern Chinese history. As was the case in Mexico, the tragedy evidenced a clear shift in the Chinese public’s expectations of their government, in the way they voiced their dissatisfaction and demanded accountability. If anything, the effect in China was perhaps more swift and more pronounced, probably because we did not have social media in 1985, and citizens had less immediate channels for criticism and debate. What was remarkable in both cases was how people long accustomed to a strong state control assumed responsibility for rescue efforts. Volunteers rushed to Sichuan to help, whether by train or car or bicycle, ahead of the government, following their own lead instead of waiting for official direction.

A second key event in the democratic transition of Mexico was the splintering within the PRI led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of Lázaro Cárdenas, the revered president famous for nationalizing the Mexican oil industry in 1938. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas led the left wing of the PRI, the faction that believed the party had lost sight of its revolutionary roots. Cárdenas founded his own party in 1987 after having been passed over as presidential candidate in favor of Carlos Salinas. Although the actual end of one-party rule did not happen in Mexico until 2000 with the election of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN), it was in effect a postponed transition, one that should have taken place in 1988 when Cárdenas ran against Salinas and by most accounts won the presidential vote—at least before some election-night chicanery threw the election in the PRI’s favor.

You can discern a similar turn of events in China. A princeling of the party, Bo Xilai, challenged Xi, the appointed successor of the state, and was purged for corruption. That purge, in turn, has touched off more anti-corruption purges against competing party leaders—effectively splitting the party. In Mexico, it was the division within the ruling party itself that paved the way for the democratic transition: With the internal political strife, the unions and vested interests that were the traditional backbone of the PRI’s support started hedging, just as in China there emerged strong dissenting factions within the Politburo. This is why Bo Xilai and his ally and former security chief Zhou Yongkang, were such a threat, and why they are both now in prison.

The third event that hastened the fall of the PRI in Mexico was a devaluation of the nation’s currency and a spectacular failure of its banks in a non-performing loans crisis, which required a massive government bailout that drove the last nail in the coffin of the PRI’s pretensions of technocratic excellence. If you are going to ask people to surrender some, or all, democratic niceties in exchange for stability and prosperity, nothing undermines that social contract as much as economic mismanagement and incompetence, especially once people have adopted middle- class expectations and are more connected to the outside world.

There is, of course, disagreement about whether China’s slowing growth, slumping stock market, and indebted companies and banks amount yet to a full-blown crisis. But it’s starting to look awfully familiar to this Mexican, and if Chinese leaders or their opponents want to look for a model or cautionary tale, they might be well-advised to visit Mexico to study what might come next.

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