Re: "Nero fiddles while Rome burns"

> On Aug 10, 2026, at 20:32, Anthony Teso via groups.io <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> This brings me to Marv and Mark, who are arguing about the wrong clause.

I did not argue with Marv over a clause but made a point about a practicality. I am drawing from the current conjuncture in the US rather than the second congress of the Comintern in 1921. 

Regarding our current challenges, let's discuss Cuba. Today, we urgently need a united front to end the war on Cuba that mobilizes as many in the US as we can to immediately end the blockade, end the embargo, and cease hostile action against Cuba. We could add to that demand the normalization of relations. We could add to that support for the Cuban government. We could call for an end to US military operations everywhere in the world. But each additional demand reduces the breadth of the movement in the current conjuncture. 

An effective united front would project demands to mobilize the most people against capital's war on Cuba. But one of the largest fronts opposing the blockade and the war escalation is a coalition of the left, https://nnoc.org/member-orgs/, with no labor, civic or mass organizations. The National Network on Cuba has documented the depth of opposition to the US decades-long war on Cuba in the form of resolutions that oppose or have opposed the embargo or inclusion of Cuba on the State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) List https://nnoc.org/resolutions/. This indicates to me an opportunity to build a broad united front against the blockade, SSOT listing, and escalation to the next forever war. 

There is a disconnect between the NNOC resolution campaign (https://nnoc.org/resolutions/) and NNOC's popular projection in its No War on Cuba (NWOC) campaign, which is sometimes called a coalition but isn't, https://nowaroncuba.com/about-the-campaign/. NWOC combines five demands that match their resolutions templates with the meta-demand, "End U.S. military and financial support for war anywhere in the world." The NWOC campaign includes the teachings of Fidel Castro for inspiration.

This is not a united front. If we were to form one, and include NNOC/NWOC, we would reduce NNOC/NWOC demands to intersect with their resolution templates to end the blockade, embargo, and SSOT listings. The resolutions are mostly fine. An effective united front would not include the maximalist demands to immediately end US military imperialism everywhere in the world, endorsement of Fidel's teachings, or support for the policies of the Cuban government. NNOC's resolutions template are a start, what we're missing is national organization, and NWOC makes the same mistakes as its parent organization.  

Mass antiwar organizations were the backbone of the anti-Vietnam War movement. It didn't make sense to form a united-front organization based on the National Peace Action Coalition's "Out Now!" (which included the SWP) with the demand "Negotiate Now" from the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice (which included the CPUSA). That would be politically schizophrenic. Certainly, the SWP, CPUSA, Poor People's Campaign, War Resisters League, labor unions, and other groups carried their own banners and projected their own slogans. But the united front was build around a smaller set of demands (one in the case of Out Now!) rather than including all their individual demands as demands of the front.

Mark

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