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Cuba May Day 2025: Report Back

by Jerome Sims & Nicole Crawford

As an organization building movement for environmental justice, we see our power reflected in Cuba and its people. We look to Cuba for critical lessons and we call for the end to economic violence against Cuba. For all of us, it needs to become clear that the same politics which could end the economic and ecological war on Cuba would also respect our rights as people, end state violence against us, respect the land, and our natural resources. As often as we can, we send our young people and our staff to learn and to report back.

Our campus life coordinator Jerome Sims traveled to Cuba on this year’s May Day brigade and brought a thought provoking report-back to our membership at our Spring/Summer Community advisory. He also co-wrote a reflection with our comrade Nicole Crawford on the lessons that we as an environmental justice movement can learn from the Cuban experience.

“If any of us came to Cuba with doubts in our mind about the solidity, strength, maturity and vitality of the Cuban Revolution, these doubts have been removed by what we have been able to see. Our hearts are now warmed by an unshakeable certainty which gives us courage in the difficult but glorious struggle against the common enemy: no power in the world will be able to destroy this Cuban Revolution, which is creating in the countryside and in the towns not only a new life but also — and even more important — a New Man, fully conscious of his national, continental and international rights and duties. In every field of activity the Cuban people have made major progress during the last seven years, particularly in 1965, Year of Agriculture.”

– Cabral The Weapon of Theory, 1966

photo by Nicole Crawford

In the context of environmental degradation it is imperative to seek solutions that reshape our relationship with the earth. Traveling to Cuba for the annual May Day Brigade, organized by the National Network on Cuba, revealed new ways to collaborate with and protect our environment. While our “brigade” did not have a militaristic purpose, our collective effort and organizing in Cuba was an act of resistance against ecological and economic warfare imposed on Cubans through the United States embargo and therefore political. Our purpose was to support the Cuban people, expressing solidarity with their struggles to live freely and protect their futures. We learned of several initiatives by the Cuban people to make their country more resilient in the face of climate catastrophe.

An example of this is Cubasolar, a program funded by the Cuban government,  to train technical brigades and install hybrid wind-diesel systems, hybrid photovoltaic (solar) wind technologies, wind farms, and hydropower infrastructure in remote communities. (1) Cubasolar has installed solar power for over 500 medical clinics, rural hospitals, and farmers’ homes to build resilience against power and electricity outages around the country as a socialist and anti-imperialist tool. Cocreating resistance with natural sources of power challenges the capitalist logic of domination because “the Sun cannot be blockaded, it cannot be dominated, it cannot be destroyed.” (2)

“Microinstitutional”, local and grassroots,(3) forms of resilience are also widespread: urban gardens allow local communities to collaborate to grow food for themselves in rural and urban areas and for farmers to share equipment to increase access and sustainability; bicycles have become a primary means of daily transportation as a direct form of resistance to US imperialist restrictions on fuel accessibility; clothes are dried outside in the sun to avoid overuse of limited energy reserves; and rainwater is collected to be reused during water outages. 

The combination of macroinstitutional, government-subsidized, programs for universal power accessibility and an interpersonal, socio-cultural prioritization of equitable resource accessibility reveals the inefficiencies and violence of capitalism. Capitalist economic systems necessitate waste, misery, hyper-individualism, and prioritize profit over collaboration with the natural world that we are accountable to. In Cuba, through social, cultural, economic, and political reorientations towards collectivism, the responsibility of each worker is to further progress towards their greater societal goals of ensuring that human rights such as water, electricity, food and fresh air are accessible to all of those who inhabit the island. 

 

Cocreating life and resistance with the earth, the Cuban people are no longer alienated from the fruits of their labor or from accountability to preserving our fragile ecological systems for future generations. Experiences such as this one are intrinsically valuable as they force those of us who live and breathe within the imperial core to radically reimagine our responsibilities to the earth and how we may begin to challenge the dogmas of consumption, violence and disregard in collaboration with our environment. 

Our Team

Board of Directors

Our Movement

Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing

Meeting hosted by Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice (SNEEJ), Jemez, New Mexico, Dec. 1996 
Activists meet on Globalization On December 6-8, 1996, forty Black, Brown, and Indigenous people and European-American representatives met in Jemez, New Mexico, for the “Working Group Meeting on Globalization and Trade.” The Jemez meeting was hosted by the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice with the intention of hammering out common understandings between participants from different cultures, politics and organizations. The following “Jemez Principles” for democratic organizing were adopted by the participants.

1.) Inclusivity

Be Inclusive If we hope to achieve just societies that include all people in decision-making and assure that all people have an equitable share of the wealth and the work of this world, then we must work to build that kind of inclusiveness into our own movement in order to develop alternative policies and institutions to the treaties policies under neoliberalism. 

This requires more than tokenism, it cannot be achieved without diversity at the planning table, in staffing, and in coordination. It may delay achievement of other important goals, it will require discussion, hard work, patience, and advance planning. It may involve conflict, but through this conflict, we can learn better ways of working together. It’s about building alternative institutions, movement building, and not compromising out in order to be accepted into the anti-globalization club. 

2.) Bottom-Up Power

To succeed, it is important to reach out into new constituencies, and to reach within all levels of leadership and membership base of the organizations that are already involved in our networks. We must be continually building and strengthening a base which provides our credibility, our strategies, mobilizations, leadership development, and the energy for the work we must do daily. 

3.) We Speak for Ourselves

We must be sure that relevant voices of people directly affected are heard. Ways must be provided for spokespersons to represent and be responsible to the affected constituencies. It is important for organizations to clarify their roles, and who they represent, and to assure accountability within our structures. 

4.) Mutuality & Solidarity

Groups working on similar issues with compatible visions should consciously act in solidarity, mutuality and support each other’s work. In the long run, a more significant step is to incorporate the goals and values of other groups with your own work, in order to build strong relationships. For instance, in the long run, it is more important that labor unions and community economic development projects include the issue of environmental sustainability in their own strategies, rather than just lending support to the environmental organizations. So communications, strategies and resource sharing is critical, to help us see our connections and build on these. 

5.) Just Relationships

We need to treat each other with justice and respect, both on an individual and an organizational level, in this country and across borders. Defining and developing “just relationships” will be a process that won’t happen overnight. It must include clarity about decision-making, sharing strategies, and resource distribution. There are clearly many skills necessary to succeed, and we need to determine the ways for those with different skills to coordinate and be accountable to one another. 

6.) Commitment to Self-Transformation

As we change societies, we must change from operating on the mode of individualism to community-centeredness. We must “walk our talk.” We must be the values that we say we’re struggling for and we must be justice, be peace, be community.

Our Ideas

East Michigan Environmental Action Council works to build a movement to produce environmental justice as a transformation of society.  We do not exercise state power and we do not have massive money wealth; we will not solve our problems with the stroke of a pen. Yet our communities have generated all of the wealth around us and the power of the state is only legitimate if it works in the interest of our collective wellbeing. So we work collectively to energize and enlighten society as a whole to act to produce justice in our environment. As such, we work to build a transformative environmental justice movement from within the broad base of neighborhoods and communities of Southeast Michigan. We analyze our community’s collective problems and work toward real solutions, those that address root causes and produce lasting change, working within our Six Pillars of Power:

 

 

    1. Science & Knowledge Production
    2. Eco-Socialism: Ecological & Economic Freedom
    3. Black Liberation: Internationalism & Solidarity
    4. People’s schools: Political Education & Organizing 
    5. Black Arts & Culture: Spiritual Grounding & Ancestral Veneration
    6. Radical Futurity: Youth Power & Intergenerational Study

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