The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide
In this revealing history of Allende's Chile, Jonathan Haslam uncovers the actual involvement of Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the CIA in that country's struggle for political and economic stability. The story begins by tracing the trajectory of the communist and socialist parties from the pre-war period through to the dramatic election of Salvador Allende as president of Chile in 1970, in a country long accustomed to political democracy but divided by great inequality of income. It weaves in an account of a new force linked to Castro's Cuba, and elucidates the longstanding politicization of the Chilean armed forces through mere talk of action in the early 1960s to the attempted coup d'etat of 1969 and the coup of 1973. It highlights the personal profile of Allende and his close ties to Cuba, and shows Soviet indifference to the fate of the regime during a period of emerging detente with the United States, which meant enduring isolation for this precarious socialist experiment.
In this tragic tale of assisted suicide, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile underlines the chronic mismanagement of the economy in the drive to socialism on the back of a minority franchise. It deepens our understanding of close US involvement in attempts to block the formation of the Unidad Popular government, and how it then attempted to bring down the regime by massive subsidies to nationwide strikes, engineering a coup led by the navy behind the back even of CIA stations in Santiago.
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Art and the victims of a free market Cuba: Planet/Cuba author Rachel Price interviewed in Guernica
Rachel Price, author of Planet/Cuba, recently sat down with Julie Schwietert Collazo of Guernica to discuss her work and the future of Cuban art. In the selections below Price explores how the ‘normalization’ of relations between the US and Cuba, and the subsequent liberalization of markets, forecloses certain freedoms afforded to practicing artists in Cuba.
Find the rest of the conversation on Guernica.
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Remembering Chile's bloody coup, 40 years on
Today marks 40 years since the US-backed coup d’état in Chile, which forced socialist president Salvador Allende out of office and installed Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship. 40 years later, Chileans remember the thousands who were murdered or disappeared, and continue to fight against impunity for those involved in the regime's atrocities.
We commemorate this watershed historical moment and its enduring legacy by recalling the final words of Allende and musician/poet Victor Jara. Both Allende’s official Farewell Speech and Jara’s final poem, “Estadio Chile,” can be found in The Verso Book of Dissent alongside 4000 years of texts, poems, and speeches by dissenting voices around the globe.
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A Survey of Verso's Responses to 9/11
Sparing no room for nuance, the magazine covers are all reminding us that the United States—and hence the planet—is set to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, a day that not only changed the world and signaled the end of innocence and spawned a new greatest generation, but also launched a thousand new slogans with which to label that day, and inspired thousands of speeches intent on inspiring thousands more.
However, despite the horror, anger, uncertainty—and yes, for some, glee—from the damage inflicted on that momentous day, there remained, in the aftermath and up to now, a limited vocabulary within the mainstream with which to describe the events of that time and the trail of destruction that followed.
And since we aren’t anticipating a commemorative circuitous flight over the country on Air Force One with the President of the United States, we would like to offer an alternate journey—that is, a survey of Verso’s responses to 9/11:
