The Venceremos Brigade

In July, members of the 52nd contingent of the Venceremos Brigade traveled to Cuba to demonstrate their solidarity with the country’s communist government. They were the latest of approximately 10,000 brigadistas who have done so since the first contingent departed in 1969. A new InfluenceWatch profile details the Venceremos Brigade’s unique decades-long history of supporting the most repressive regime in the Western Hemisphere.

Sugar and the New Left

In 1969, Cuba’s planned economy was struggling, and Fidel Castro had announced that harvesting 10 million tons of refined sugar—far more than the previous record set in 1952—would provide the shot in the arm that the island needed. Accomplishing this would require an all-out national effort and the mobilization of vast numbers of machete-wielding laborers. It just so happened that a delegation from the New Left activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was in Havana at the time, and one of them—former SDS president Carl Oglesby, who related the story in his 2008 memoir Ravens in the Storm—came up with the idea of sending droves of young American radicals into the sugarcane fields to help.

The Cuban authorities were receptive to the idea, so Oglesby pitched it to Bernardine Dohrn and the rest of SDS’s increasingly radical leadership. To his surprise, he found himself denounced as a “liberal” who was uncommitted to Marxism-Leninism and “the revolution.” Oglesby was summarily sidelined from his own project before it got off the ground, while the soon-to-implode SDS undertook preparations. The Cubans, however, were wary of Dohrn, so according to Oglesby they asked him to continue secretly consulting with them about what would become known as the Venceremos Brigade.

Over 1,300 American brigadistas traveled to Cuba from 1969 to 1970 with the initial three Venceremos Brigade contingents. The first two contingents were sent to the sugarcane fields. The harvest, however, turned out to be a debacle. It netted an impressive 8.5 million tons—an all-time record—but at major cost to the island’s overall economy. A 1974 New York Times article explained that the combination of low sugar prices from increased supply and the neglect of other economic sectors made the harvest one of the least-profitable in the country’s history. “However one looked at it,” the paper observed, it had been a “disaster.”

The Brigade Lives On

Nevertheless, the Venceremos Brigade continued dispatching annual contingents of far-left radicals to perform all manner of work in support of the Cuban Revolution. Naturally, this made it the subject of American government investigations, which tended to focus on whether returning brigadistas might proceed to become propagandists, spies, or even domestic militants. Evidence pointed to the involvement of Cuba’s intelligence apparatus in Venceremos Brigade activities. The FBI ultimately produced at least 23,000 pages worth of files on the group, according to historian Teishan A. Latner’s 2018 book Cuban Revolution in America. One particularly interesting account came in the form of congressional testimony given by a New Orleans–area sheriff’s deputy, who managed to infiltrate the fifth Venceremos Brigade contingent in 1972 by posing as a leftist activist. Despite all this, Latner wrote that no brigadistas were ever convicted of crimes related to their having traveled to Cuba.

Over the years, a number of Venceremos Brigade veterans have gone on to prominent careers in left-wing activism, higher education, and Democratic politics. This includes two of the three most recent mayors of Los Angeles (Democrats Karen Bass and Antonio Villaraigosa); former Center for Constitutional Rights and National Lawyers Guild president, the late Michael Ratner; and prominent labor union official and Clinton Administration appointee Karen Nussbaum. Before joining a domestic terrorist group called the May 19th Communist Organization, Susan Rosenberg was a brigadista. Rosenberg has more recently attracted attention for serving on the board of the nonprofit Thousand Currents, the former fiscal sponsor of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.

Today, the Venceremos Brigade is plugged into the world of far-left nonprofit activism. Formerly a fiscally sponsored project of the Alliance for Global Justice, in 2024 it began identifying itself as a project of the People’s Forum, a 501(c)(3) public charity that is reportedly funded by the Marxist founder of Thoughtworks Neville Roy Singham. For an illustration of the People’s Forum’s programming, consider a recent course offering entitled “Prospects for Revolution in the United States.”

The brigade’s status as a project makes its finances virtually impossible to discern. Brigadistas are generally expected to pay for their own trip, and the cost in 2024 was $2,400—significantly more than the average Cuban’s annual salary. It is perhaps worth asking whether a group that has been in existence for 50+ years should still be operating under a fiscal sponsorship arrangement, instead of as a standalone nonprofit required to file its own annual disclosures.

Some Things Never Change

The history of the Venceremos Brigade is fascinating, and it provides yet another illustration of just how influential the 1960s-era New Left was for today’s radical activists. The introduction to the book Venceremos Brigade: Young Americans Sharing the Life and Work of Revolutionary Cuba—a collection of firsthand accounts from early brigadistas—featured the following declaration:

We don’t want the social and economic chaos which imperialism is bringing on itself. We want a new social order in which the United States contributes its vast technological resources to the alleviation of human misery, not its perpetuation, and to the liberation of people everywhere from the corruption of capitalist overdevelopment as well as from the tyranny of underdevelopment. To bring this new world into being, we must confront the institutions which preserve an aging empire, with revolutionary institutions which extend the power of all peoples to determine their collective destinies.

This was written in 1971, but it could be copied verbatim onto the website of any number of left-wing groups in 2024, and nobody would ever know the difference. The rhetoric is perfectly consistent a half-century later.

Read the full Venceremos Brigade profile on InfluenceWatch here.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-venceremos-brigade/