Socialist candidate enters race to be Houston mayor

March 11, 2001 - Houston: Local Marxists foresee a revolutionary future***The odor of spaghetti sauce lingered heavily at the Socialist Workers Party's Houston headquarters as the speaker delivered his impassioned blast against recent American and British air attacks on Iraq.

Seated on folding metal chairs beneath unblinking fluorescent lights, 20 party members and sympathizers listened with furrowed brows. Within them, viscous office coffee battled a starchy pasta dinner. Around them flowed the verbiage of body counts, genocide, imperialist war and the oil greed of collapsing capitalism.

At their front was an array of English and Spanish political posters; at their back, tomes of Marxist history and theory, including those by Leon Trotsky, on whose beliefs the party is based.

A timid knock came at the door, followed by a woman's puzzled face and the unlikely question: "Would this happen to be an AA meeting?"

It was anything but. This was a precursor to the revolution -- the long-awaited day when dispossessed workers and farmers will rise and capitalism and its attendant abuses will be chunked onto history's ash heap.

Though American Marxism never got off the ground and Soviet-style socialism crashed in economic and social failure, Houston's small band of devoted communists believes the glorious red dawn is, as history measures time, right around the corner.

When it comes, they will be ready.

"We think this is the best time in our history to be Marxists," said Jacquie Henderson, the Canadian-born chapter chairwoman who once played baseball against Cuba's Fidel Castro. "Our prospects have never been so good."***

Fidel Castro - Cuba

The Chairman smiles/"Let's do our Job! In 1961, Cuban schools close for several months. All students go to the countryside to teach the population reading and writing. Illiteracy is reduced from around thirty percent to virtually zero. Alphabetization serves political purposes too: illiterate people are unable to help building the new society. The exercise books use words and concepts from revolutionary practice, such as 'cooperation' and 'agrarian reform'

August 8, 2003 - Cuban Educators Spark Political Storm in Venezuela***The Venezuelan literacy campaign, which began in July has drawn heavy criticism from Chavez' opponents, who say he wants to "Cubanize" the world's No. 5 oil exporter and will use the education program to deepen his own self-styled revolution. Indeed, Castro set up a similar project in 1961 sending 250,000 teachers across the country in a yearlong project to teach one million Cubans to read.

But Eliecer Otayza, a former army colleague of Chavez who heads the "Mission Robinson: I Can Do It" program to teach reading and writing skills, dismisses such criticism. The education program, he says, is simply a cultural accord between two countries. The program is named after Simon Bolivar's teacher Simon Rodriguez, nicknamed "Robinson."

"Without a doubt, it is an ambitious plan to educate one million people," said Otayza, president of the INCE national education institute, where the Caribbean accents of Cuban teachers are now a familiar sound. More than 100,000 Venezuelans are to be trained as teachers.

Chavez, who survived a brief coup in 2002 and a crippling oil strike in December and January, says teaching the approximately 1.5 million illiterate people -- about 9 percent of the adult population -- to read is vital to the nation's progress.

The education program is one of several joint projects between Cuba and Venezuela. Under an accord signed between Chavez and Castro in 2000, Venezuela supplies 53,000 barrels of crude daily to Cuba and Havana has sent doctors, sugar industry technicians, sports trainers and agricultural experts to Caracas.

Since his election on a populist platform in 1998, Chavez has moved Venezuela away from traditional allies such as the United States in favor of stronger ties with China, Libya, Iran, Iraq and Cuba.

………..Castro's 1961 education campaign, which aimed make one million people literate through a program of phonetic repetition, virtually paralyzed Cuba when about 250,000 volunteers fanned out across the country over a year. But as a result, Communist-run Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America.

The Venezuelan program is based on a method developed by Cuban teacher Leonela Relys, who said that within three months, using 65 audiovisual classes and an exercise book, students could learn to write their names, read with minimum proficiency and write simple messages and letters. Cuba is donating 50,000 television sets to aid the literacy drive.

"It is a revolutionary technique," Otayza said. "There are other methods, but this is a revolutionary technique that gets results. It's a Venezuelan-Cuban method we have adopted."

But the program has plenty of skeptics.

"I don't believe it. How are they going to do that in three months when in Cuba it took a yearlong nonstop campaign that covered all corners of the country?" said Ismael Orta, a Cuban educator now settled in Miami.

Orta, who graduated in 1976 from Havana University as a middle school English teacher, acknowledges that many people learned to read and write under the Cuban literacy drive.

"The teachings of the spelling book, which had 15 lessons, ended with a letter which read, 'Now you can read and write. Thank you, Fidel.' People would read it and weep. It was all a show." ***

Chávez's school plans ignite furor in Venezuela ***New history texts for fourth- and sixth-graders published in 1999 praised Chávez's coup attempt and branded as ``corrupt oligarchies'' the two parties that ruled Venezuela since the late 1950s, Democratic Action and COPEI. Chávez has also greatly expanded a system of paramilitary classes in public high schools that had long been on the books but were seldom held, portraying them as ``the founding stones of the new Venezuelan man.''

``He is promoting militarism, infecting texts with viruses that foster class hatreds ... and speak against globalization and privatization,'' Raffalli said in an interview. Chávez recently signed a deal with Cuba under which Havana will train Venezuelan teachers and provide educational materials, and Education Minister Hector Navarro last year approved a nationwide essay competition on the life of Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary Ernesto ``Ché'' Guevara.***

Hugo Chavez - Venezuela

"We'll tell the truth, the unvarnished truth," Dutrow said. "We're running a campaign which is a working-class alternative to the twin parties of racism, war, unemployment."

International educators conference held in Cuba [Full Text] HAVANA - President Fidel Castro told a group of educators from around the world that education can create a better world by helping to resolve social problems, such as the nagging racial discrimination that still exists in Cuba. Closing the international educators conference here on Friday night, Castro told hundreds of participants that over four decades his socialist government can boast high marks for its primary school programs. But he said secondary education here needs serious improvement.

Beginning in early 2002, Cuba launched a campaign to improve conditions at its primary schools, but reforms for the older students are still pending. Cuba's secondary school program will be radically improved, Castro declared. "The future developing of our education will have enormous political, social and human connotations," the Cuban leader said.

Despite the huge changes that the 1959 revolution made in Cuban society, some social problems have not been completely eliminated, including racial discrimination, Castro acknowledged. "While science shows unquestionably the real equality that exists among human beings, discriminations lives on," especially among the island's poorest groups, Castro said. [End]

Go after the children - education through indoctrination is their key.

Texas City, TX - A CLASS STRUGGLE: Tenure of Avowed Marxist Controversy jolts College***"In a nutshell, it means I have a fundamental disagreement with capitalism," he said. "I think that capitalism is a system based on exploitation and oppression and domination and racism and war and lots of other things.

"So I'm totally opposed to capitalism, and I think that the majority of the people of this country ought to get together and transform the system," he said. "I think we need to replace capitalism with some kind of democratic socialism."***

Bump!

Communism is not dead, despite of the changes in E Europe and the Soviet Union. It's taking hold in some S. American countries, like Venezuela, and the communists haven't given up on the US yet, either.

The Democrats are shifting more and more to the left also, and have been for years.

The only good thing about this socialist running for Mayor, is that maybe he'll split the Dem vote and a Republican gets elected, although I am not familiarwith the dynamics in Houston.

ARTICLE SNIPPET: "Anthony Dutrow, part of a national Socialist Workers Party campaign to change the U.S. government under the party's terms, will try to sell the socialist platform locally as a candidate for Houston mayor.

He says he's offering something different than Houston's other mayoral candidates."

An FYI Link:

THE MILITANT.com
http://www.themilitant.com/

The odor of spaghetti sauce lingered heavily at the Socialist Workers Party's Houston headquarters....

ODOR?? You can bet there were no real Italians fixin pasta for that crowd.. ;)

They never give up and they never tell the truth.

How Many Members Of The U.S. Congress Are Self-Declared Socialists?

I am not familiar with the dynamics in Houston.

I am, and this turkey could win in a landslide within the Houston city limits!

Your LINK: A socialist newsweekly published in the interests of working people

More from The Progressive Challenge

re post no. 10..."in the interests of working people"

NO.

Communist recruiting with tips to battle conservatives

"this turkey could win in a landslide within the Houston city limits! "

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You have my sympathy. And I thought Los Angeles was bad...

Websites with Oppressive or Right-wing Agendas That Undermine Democracy & Diversity

"Websites with Oppressive or Right-wing Agendas That Undermine Democracy & Diversity "

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Thanks! What worries me,is that they seem so organized, more so, than conservatives, who don't seem to realize that communists are still a real threat.

Regarding LINK in Post #14 - FreeRepublic is included.

This is their religion.

ping

I've passed by this site before.

THEIR AGENDA is obvious.

So is Chavez's and his imported Cuban teachers and advisors.

(Read between the lines - including the headline - teaching the next generation to be passive) Venezuela tries to pull politics out of the classroom***To be sure, teaching children how to bury the hatchet has proven difficult. Many parents who took part in the strike have been forced to transfer their children out of schools in pro-Chávez neighborhoods because of playground taunts and threats. Conversely, government ministers, whose children have been the targets of abuse in tony private academies on the city's east side, have switched schools as well, balkanizing the children.

Youngsters have been quick to adopt the political positions of their elders, and unlearning takes time. This is especially true in Caracas, where a "Berlin Wall" of political difference separates the poor, pro-Chávez barrios in the west from the glitzy, anti-Chávez east. Schools fall in line with neighborhoods, like so many political chips.

"In lots of cases, teachers forbid their students to discuss politics, but the solution to the problem is not to sweep it under the table," says Mr. Perrera. "Children, just like adults, need to learn how to communicate in ways that are healthy."

In the absence of a nationwide effort, child-welfare organizations have joined with educators and child psychiatrists in an ad hoc effort to depoliticize the classroom. CECODAP sponsors workshops for students as well as teachers.

A handful of nonprofit groups are at work training teachers around the country in the basic tenets of dispute-settlement: focus on the problems, not the participants; learn how to listen; look for "win-win" solutions that are free of judgment. Role-playing is suggested, and instructors are encouraged to incorporate peacemaking into their curricula.

At Alberdi elementary, where children play soccer in a dusty field next to a mountain of rusted chairs and desks, values are taught every day.

In a drab second-floor classroom, sixth-grade teacher Danny Camaripano stands in front of his 60 students, pensively rolling a piece of chalk between his fingers.

"What would you do if someone wanted to fight you?" he asks the classroom.

Norma Acosa, a beaming extrovert, raises her hand.

"I wouldn't do it," she says.

"What would you do?" Mr. Camaripano asks her.

"I'd talk with him, and find out what the problem is," Norma says.

Over the course of the 50-minute class, Camaripano lectures about values and peppers his students with hypotheticals, coaxing tentative answers from quiet types and back-row pranksters alike.***

Cuba Exports City Farming 'Revolution' to Venezuela - Has U.N. Blessing *** CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - In a conference room at Venezuela's military academy, a group of soldiers listen attentively to a pair of Cuban instructors. The subject being taught is not revolutionary guerrilla warfare as once practiced by Fidel Castro, but the "organoponic farming revolution," communist Cuba's latest export to its closest South American ally, Venezuela. "Organoponic gardening," a system of concentrated, organic urban vegetable cultivation, is taking root in central Caracas, amid the piles of garbage, bands of homeless beggars and tens of thousands of vehicles belching out polluting gas fumes.

Inspired by Cuba's system of urban market gardens, which has been operating for several years, left-wing President Hugo Chavez has ordered the creation of similar intensive city plots across Venezuela in a bid to develop food self-sufficiency in the world's No. 5 oil exporter. "Let's sow our cities with organic, hydroponic mini-gardens," said the populist former paratrooper, who survived a brief coup a year ago and toughed out a crippling opposition strike in December and January. Inside Fuerte Tiuna military headquarters, soldiers of the crack Ayala armored battalion supervised by Cuban instructors have swapped their rifles for shovels and hoes to tend neat rows of lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, coriander and parsley.***