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  • Monthly Review Essays

About W. T. Whitney, Jr.

W. T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician.
  • Medicine students look through microscopes at a laboratory of the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana. | Javier Galeano / AP

    Science and the knowledge economy bolster Cuba’s socialist revolution

    Originally published: People's World on August 16, 2024 (more by People's World)  |

    Cuba and Cuban science gained acclaim worldwide for producing very effective COVID-19 vaccines.

  • Mural by Dan Manrique Arias | Photo by Terence Faircloth, CC BY-SA 4.0

    Awareness of capitalists’ use of colonialism invites rethinking of solidarity commitment

    Originally published: Communist Party of Maine on August 23, 2024 (more by Communist Party of Maine)

    Studying capitalism, Karl Marx examined the Industrial Revolution in Europe. He explored conflict between worker and employer.

  • Some of the weapons seized from a Florida-based terrorist captured on Cuban soil after he snuck onto the island via jet ski. | Photo courtesy of Granma

    The terror returns: Cuba discloses latest attacks by the U.S.

    Originally published: People's World on January 16, 2024 (more by People's World)  |

    When the U.S. government launched its so-called “Global War on Terror” after the al Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S.-led terror attacks against Cuba had already been ongoing for over 40 years.

  • In this March 27, 2020, file photo, William Samuels delivers caskets to the Gerard Neufeld Funeral Home during the coronavirus pandemic in the Queens borough of New York. New data finds that life expectancy in the United States has dropped significantly over the past few years. It is clear that racial minorities suffered the biggest impact, but census information ignores the role of socioeconomic class. | Mark Lennihan / AP

    Press coverage of declining U.S. life expectancy evades the truth about class

    Originally published: People's World on September 28, 2022 (more by People's World)  |

    Mainstream media takes on the bad news on life expectancy barely mention international comparisons — notably ignoring China and Cuba — and neglect the political and economic context of the drop, writes WT WHITNEY Jr.

  • Steven Senne / AP

    Climate change has long prompted migration, now it may drive anti-capitalist consciousness, too

    Originally published: People's World on August 11, 2022 (more by People's World)  |

    U.S. government programs for migrants who cross the country’s southern border are punitive and disjointed.

  • Climate protest / strike

    Climate research strike? Linking up environmental science with the ‘science of society’

    Originally published: People's World on March 16, 2022 (more by People's World)  |

    Hundreds of IPCC scientists provide the United Nations periodically with reports on adverse impacts of climate change. The most recent report, issued in February, details rising seas, terrible droughts, atypical weather events, thawing permafrost, dying forests, and massive displacement of populations.

  • Viral propaganda: In the social media age, the U.S.' anti-Cuba efforts have to keep up with the way people get their information (and disinformation). Here, protesters in Key West, Fla., use their phones to photograph and video a flag reading 'SOS Cuba' from atop the Southernmost Point buoy, July 13, 2021. | Rob O'Neal/The Key West Citizen via AP

    U.S. government pays big money for bad news about Cuba

    Originally published: People's World on January 25, 2022 (more by People's World)  |

    The cruder U.S. methods for destroying Cuba’s revolutionary government—military attacks, bombings of hotels and a fully-loaded airplane, violent attacks on officials, biological warfare—did not work. Nor has economic blockade, which of course continues. A more subtle approach also exists. Like the blockade, its purpose is to cause despair and then dissent.

  • Jesús Santrich

    Bolivarianism & Marxism: Commitment to the Impossible in Defense of Utopia

    Jesús Santrich and W. T. Whitney, Jr.

    Socialist revolution throughout the world, looking to the horizon of the communist utopia, will have to collide with worldwide capitalism for that phenomenon to be overcome definitively. Socialist revolution surely will be breaking the imperialists’ chain at its weakest link, as Lenin would have said.

  • A nurse shows a dose of the Soberana-02 COVID-19 vaccine to be used in a volunteer as part of Phase III trials of the experimental Cuban vaccine candidate in Havana, Cuba, March 31, 2021

    U.S. imperialists deprive Cuba of syringes that are needed now

    W. T. Whitney, Jr.

    Cuba, the first Latin America country to develop its own COVID-19 vaccines, presently is short of syringes for immunizing its population against the virus. It’s not feasible for Cuba to make its own syringes. The U.S. blockade prevents Cuba from importing them from abroad.

  • Flickr - U.S Military Forces in Haiti - Historical Image Archive333

    Recurring political crisis in Haiti connects with U.S. racism

    W. T. Whitney, Jr.

    Haiti faces serious political crisis. The country has experienced great political difficulties ever since gaining independent nationhood in 1804. Impaired governance stems in large measure from U.S. meddling over many years. We examine the current crisis and the basis for U.S. zeal to curtail Haiti’s future.

  • Arya Rajendran

    Kerala communists serve the people, look to youth and women

    W. T. Whitney, Jr.

    At 21 years of age, Arya Rajendran is barely eligible to vote. Nevertheless, she is now the mayor of Kerala’s capital city Thiruvananthapuram, population 2,585,000. She is a second-year student at All Saints College. She concentrates in math.

  • VENEZUELA-OPPOSITION-DEMO A demonstrator holds a Venezuelan flag in front of riot policemen during an opposition demo against the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, in Caracas on February 12, 2014. Unidentified assailants on a motorcycle fired into a crowd of anti-government protesters, wounding at least two people. AFP PHOTO / JUAN BARRETO

    Colombia/U.S. Axis: Hitting at Venezuela

    W. T. Whitney, Jr.

    Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and Colombian President Ivan Duque, meeting in Bogota on September 20, talked about “managing the COVID-19 response … narcotraffickers … and [President] Maduro’s illegitimate regime,” according to the State Department.

  • 'End systematic racism' (Photo: Pikist)

    Under capitalism Black Lives are adrift and vulnerable

    W. T. Whitney, Jr.

    Post-Civil War arrangements by which the victorious North settled with the defeated slavocracy ensured that many Black people would not matter much and that some would die. A thousand or so were murdered in the South in 1866, reports W.E. B Du Bois.

  • We Charge Genocide

    “We Charge Genocide”—forerunner at UN of Black Lives Matter

    W. T. Whitney, Jr.

    “Once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the policeman’s bullet.”

  • "Simón Trinidad" and Piedad Cordoba

    U.S. must return its political prisoner Simón Trinidad to Colombia

    W. T. Whitney, Jr.

    Simón Trinidad matters; his time has come. This leader of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) faced bizarre and unfounded criminal charges in a U.S. court. He’s being held under the cruelest of conditions in a federal prison in Florence, Colorado. He will die there unless he is released. Simón Trinidad will be 70 years old on July 30.

  • Occasional Links & Commentary - WordPress.com Forward without forgetting” | occasional links & commentary

    Economic collapse and unemployment councils—then and now

    W. T. Whitney, Jr.

    Hunger, homelessness, and evictions were features of the Great Depression in the United States. Jobs disappeared and working conditions deteriorated. Some “250,000 teenagers were on the road.” And how many others? By 1933 one third of farm families had lost their farms. Unemployment that year was 25 percent. The lives of working people were devastated.

  • China supply deliveries

    Pandemic story: failures, forebodings, signs of solidarity

    W. T. Whitney, Jr.

    A great hazard looms. Under duress and as chaos mounts, capital may find it useful to revert to the extremist, even brutal, measures figuring in its past.

  • Cuba has equipped all ports of entry with advanced technology to monitor individuals arriving and detect any sign of Covid-19

    Fighting COVID-19 in Cuba, China and the United States

    W. T. Whitney, Jr.

    The pandemic has effectively provided a laboratory-like demonstration that people do better when states can plan ahead, apply national resources unequivocally to the public good, put science in the service of the people, and practice international solidarity. These are characteristics of socialist societies.

  • The U.S. blockade of Cuba is like the sun; neither will disappear soon. But different: the U.S. politicians and people are aware of the sun, but may have forgotten about the Cuba blockade. It’s persisted for almost 60 years, basically unchanged. The following is about change.

    Looking at change: U.S. and Cuba, blockade and revolution

    W. T. Whitney, Jr.

    The U.S. blockade of Cuba is like the sun; neither will disappear soon. But different: the U.S. politicians and people are aware of the sun, but may have forgotten about the Cuba blockade. It’s persisted for almost 60 years, basically unchanged. The following is about change.

  • Wikipedia Landscape painting - Wikipedia

    For the climate: protecting the Commons and fixing Democracy

    W. T. Whitney, Jr.

    Climate change, unchecked, promises planetary disaster. All forms of life are threatened. Scientific evidence strongly suggests capitalistforms of production and consumption gave rise to climate change in the first place and have allowed the process to advance.

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