Dear Progressive Reader,
We have said it more than once in the past couple years, but: What a difference a week makes. The Super Tuesday results, following close on the heels of the South Carolina primary, created a tectonic shift in the political landscape of this election year. As Ruth Conniff writes this week, “The consolidation behind [Joe] Biden—with his former rivals Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O’Rourke all endorsing him over the last few days—was sweeping and swift.” However, as Conniff points out, “Super Tuesday allocated [only] about one-third of the Democratic Party delegates who will nominate their party’s presidential candidate at the convention. But the race is still on.” Six more states will hold primaries next week, and four more the following week. The last states will not conclude their primary elections until the first week of June.
Mark Fiore brings back an incredibly current archival comic from four years ago that illustrates the complexities of the convention math yet to come. Vermonter Lee Russ reminds us this week that so many of the attacks on Bernie Sanders’s health care plans are based in false narratives. Lisa Graves of True North Research digs into the background of the “dark money” that financed Donald Trump’s win in Wisconsin in 2016. And Harvey Wasserman compares Trump’s rise to power to the theft of baseball’s World Series.
And finally, this week we mourn the passing of two great poets and revolutionaries of Latin America and the Caribbean.
On March 1, Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan priest and former Minister of Culture, passed away at the age of ninety-five. Cardenal had studied under the renowned pacifist Thomas Merton in the late-1950s, and founded the experimental community of Solentiname in Nicaragua during the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. He composed numerous books of poetry and promoted a vision of Christian-Marxism that led to his being snubbed by Pope John Paul II during a visit to Nicaragua in 1983. In the poem “Vision from the Blue Plane-Window” published in 2009, Cardenal wrote of looking down on his home country, “This is the face of the land liberated. / And where all the people fought, I think: / for love!”
On March 2, Rafael Cancel Miranda passed away at the age of eighty-nine. He was the last survivor of a group of four Puerto Rican nationalists who fired shots inside the United States Capitol in 1954 during a session of Congress. Cancel Miranda spent twenty-five years in federal prison, finally being freed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. I interviewed Rafael Cancel Miranda in the late-1990s, nearly twenty years after his release. He remained throughout his life a committed activist for Puerto Rican independence. “We did some shooting,” he told me, but their intent was not to kill, but to raise awareness for their cause. Speaking to The Progressive in 1989, Cancel Miranda, then nearly sixty, said “They [the FBI] still have our phones tapped. Many times they still follow us.” But, as he once wrote in one of his many beautiful activist poems, “The revolutionary is a man thrown from his home into combat for his highest concepts of loyalty to his people. . . . We don't beg heaven for what we can obtain struggling.”
Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
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