Claudia de la Cruz, the 2024 presidential candidate from the Party for Socialism and Liberation, just became director of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO).
IFCO is the only org bringing US medical students to study at Cuba’s ELAM (Latin American School of Medicine), the largest medical school in the world. ELAM provides full scholarships for students. IFCO has worked to support Cuban solidarity since 1967, sending aid and acting as liaison between Cuba and the Congressional Black Caucus.
A principled socialist now runs the main connection between the US and Cuba’s medical system. This also deeply embeds PSL in older US orgs for leftist internationalism, and continues PSL’s work as a vanguard party leading the struggle.
This is one of the most unfortunate things about being a socialist. We are almost too principled. A single chapter having a spat between some people who cheated on one another gets blown up into a full party sexual scandal while a Republican candidate can fuck 50 women in public at the same time in front of his wife with no repercussions.
I get why, but it sure makes it easy for the feds to fuck up all of our operations.
Sometimes you just have to have the maturity to see where your priorities lie and not allow yourself to be distracted by things which are not important in the larger picture. Or in Marxist language: understand which contradictions are primary and which are secondary.
Of course party discipline within a vanguard party should and must be maintained. An undisciplined party apparatus is an inefficient one. If anything, i think most western leftist groups suffer from a lack of discipline.
As much as we try to fight it, for many of us liberalism and individualism are still deeply rooted in our psyche due to how western societies have conditioned us, and this leads to a lot of selfish behavior and inability to properly implement democratic centralism.
But when it comes to things that don’t immediately impact the political activities and the organization of the party, we have to recognize that humans are humans and we all have flaws and we cannot get hung up on every imperfection or mistake of other people.