The Darkness in Burns, Oregon

By Donnell Alexander, Rolling Stone

07 February 16

A reporter visits the area where armed white militants have taken over a wildlife refuge, and feels like a "sitting black duck"

he far-flung high-desert town of Burns, Oregon, is not, strictly speaking, where followers of Ammon and Ryan Bundy took over a federal building and plotted the overthrow of the American government — that's 30 flat and lonely miles south. Still, Burns is out there, in the middle of nowhere. Though it's well within the Pacific Northwest's boundaries, Harney County has little in common with hip, laid-back Portland, where I live. The last marijuana dispensary is in Bend, 130 miles away. As the distance to the Idaho border shrinks, the roadside snow gets deeper, and the people get whiter.

On January 2nd, a few dozen folks calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom holed up at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The Bureau of Land Management, the longtime nemesis of the conservative West, owns the nature preserve, home to Native American artifacts and endangered plants and animals. The occupation was purportedly started to support jailed Harney County ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond, who are now imprisoned in California for illegally burning government land. The occupiers invited comrades from across the country to join their festival of militarized religious fervor and heavy weaponry.

Harney County measures a little over 10,000 square miles and has about 7,000 residents. It feels like a small place, but the armed takeover has caused a palpable ripple effect. With the ubiquitous presence of law enforcement, endless public meetings about the occupation and the whole country watching, Burns, the nearest town of any considerable size, finds itself converted into an ideological proving ground. Poverty here stands at 18.6 percent. Thirty years ago, the place had seven timber mills; today it has none. The county's hard tilt from timber to ranching brings local sentiment sufficiently in line with the anti-government Bundys.

Here is my dilemma: American populist rebellion turns me on. Straight Outta Compton — the revolutionary 1988 cassette tape, not the slick cinematic hagiography — blew my mind. I covered Redwood Summer and turned up on day one of Occupy San Francisco. Anarchy is like dope to me. So I'm naturally drawn to Harney County.

On the other hand, the ignorant white motherfuckers at the wildlife refuge seem crazier than cat shit.

They blend in," John tells me of the occupiers who've come to Burns, as we sip our beers. John and I — along with Jim, a friend of his who's also from the Burns Paiute Reservation — are sitting in the corner of Central Pastime, a downtown establishment. It's Friday, my first night in town. I don't see any guns in the bar, which, in Burns these days, is no small thing. 

I took up the stool next to John and Jim because if you want to get to the heart of American unrest, you best ask a person of color. (I'm not using their real names, given the tensions in town.) But there is a deeper truth, too: I feel safer with them. Oregon is the only northern state admitted to the Union that prohibited free blacks from taking up residence. Even in Portland, I stand out. And now I'm more than 100 miles beyond cell phone range, and I feel like a sitting black duck.

It's not just the occupiers I'm worried about; even before the Bundys showed up, there were more guns than households in Second-Amendment-loving Eastern Oregon. Guns are everywhere. Until recently, militia members — calling themselves names like the Pacific Patriots and the 3% of Idaho — and various unaffiliated Harney County residents were dining at nearby establishments with their sidearms on full display. Now, nightlife in town is ebbing; local law enforcement say many business owners are now shutting down after dark, in the name of security. Just a week before my visit, between 35 and 50 armed militants poured into a town meeting of 100 fretful residents and, by all accounts, silently intimidated the gathering into acquiescence. "They're bullies," Jim tells me.

John and Jim had been keeping their eyes on the militants' televised press conferences from outside the preserve's entrance — how could they ignore the spectacle, at first? But they've since given up on that. The day after we talk, they learn the Bundy followers may have desecrated their people's sacred remains at the refuge. Of course, there's no press conference for that.

As we leave Central Pastime, I tell them about my plan to go out to the nature preserve and ask the patriot leadership, "How long do you think this insurrection would last if it was me leading it?"

"Or if it was me?" asks Jim.

Outside my motel door, I can sometimes hear the word "media" hurled like a slur from the parking lot. Dirty media. I come across a couple staying in the room next door who support the occupation, and who also ooze this antipathy toward journalists. Still, on Saturday, they engage me in a discussion about life on the Ranch, as the Bundy followers now call the preserve.

I ask the wife — a thin, middle-aged woman who wears shades on gray days and has an air of uppers about her — if fellowship among the conservatives who had traveled from Kansas and New Mexico and beyond was as central to the Bundy road show as their grudge against the feds.

"Well, if you did your homework..."

"I'm a reporter," I tell her. "This is my homework."

This right-wing hatred of journalists is at least partially understandable — these folks may not love being all but taunted in the news. But in another sense, it's misguided: These people are the media, too. Insurgent websites such as Defend Your Base helped inform and organize support networks for the occupation across the West. Many thousands of dollars and supplies have flowed through them. (The Defend Your Base website is now down, though its YouTube channel remains up.)

The motel is flush with the weekend's arrivals. The lady next door says she and her husband have met "tens of thousands" of folks, online and in person, who support the insurgency. The militants and their supporters have a certain vibe. The ones not high on liberty strike me as high on meth. (And there may be some overlap: Everyone talks a great deal about the price of gold.) Some have lawn chairs, and many have dogs. They all seem to have plenty of time. Burns' gathering of the indignant feels, above all, like Burning Man for readers of The Blaze.

The least white part of Eastern Oregon is the sky, as endless and melodramatic as a telenovela. Sun bounces off the snow at the nearly 187,800-acre Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which, a sign out front proclaims, is now called the Harney County Resource Center. It is in this Sunday morning light that I'm met at the gate by a young man who tells me Ammon Bundy is at church, that I should come back in a few hours. Then, without explanation, he lets me in anyway. I park my rental car, and a man in a rally-style Jeep finds me. Everyone smiles politely. I'm led to Duane Ehmer.

Ehmer, 45, is wearing a Desert Storm veteran's cap atop his close-cropped hair. Around us languish abandoned government vehicles and a bunch of brick houses, where some of the occupiers sleep. Over yonder is the refuge's gift shop — still pristine, as Ehmer points out. An American flag flies above it. Ehmer and his auburn American Cow Horse Hellboy brought the flag down from Central Oregon's Morrow County, where he operates a welding business. He tells me he initially came to the preserve because he opposed the occupation; when news reached him of a terrorist invasion in Harney County, he and Hellboy hit the road. "I'm a cowboy," he says, "so I loaded up all of my guns and came here to stop them."

Then, Ehmer says, he was told about the Bundys' unacknowledged efforts to rally support for the Hammonds by appealing to legislators and the newspapers. The occupation of the refuge, he decided, was a last resort. He was won over to the cause and made a trusted insider. He says he was given the codename Q1, based on the James Bond character, and because of his reconnaissance expertise. Ehmer has an unsettlingly gregarious nature, suggesting a man who has seen and done regrettable things.

Ehmer grabs a stick, and starts drawing in the mud. There we are, a dot at the center of the struggle. A half-circle around us represents the city of Burns and the hundreds of supporters there: a buffer zone. These people function as eyes and ears on law enforcement, who are using the local Superior Courthouse as a command center. "I'm going to know when 20 black SUVs move out," Ehmer says.

Ehmer tugs at my camouflage jacket and says he's sworn off camo forever — because, you know, all the war. He seems legitimately anguished about not being able to see his daughter while he is away from home.

During the 45 minutes I spend inside the occupied refuge, I experience a calm and acceptance that is utterly unlike the vibe back in Burns. The occupiers ask me to stay, and invite me to eat. I talk to several other people in addition to Ehmer, and at no point do I feel racial animus.

Still, I ask Ehmer the question: Dude. Come on. You know if it was me and my folks out here, doing some armed takeover, it would have been shut down in about 20 minutes, right?

Ehmer guffaws, then catches himself. Few of these people have struck me as smart, but they do know how to follow a set of guidelines (the Constitution, for example). So, once Ehmer settles down, he delivers the politically correct response. "We're all military in here," he says. "You should know that once you're military, none of that stuff matters." He doesn't understand the question, or is at least pretending not to.

Several people tell me about a black Bundy supporter who's apparently part of the occupation, but I never see him.

Eventually, Ehmer's tone drops its gregarious quality, and he points me toward Ryan Bundy. "He's at the center of it all, where strategy's concerned," Ehmer says. It's mostly Ammon who represents the Ranch gang in the media, perhaps because of Ryan's facial disability; he was run over by a car at age seven, and a bone spur sliced a nerve in his brain. He cannot be the face of the movement, but he may well be its melancholy soul.

As I explain to Ryan why I'm there, he sticks his hand out, and I take it. His handshake is powerful, more so than any of the many military men on the site. He's the size of a linebacker.

He takes my cell phone number, as well as the info for my room back at the motel, but he never calls. On Tuesday night, he and his brother are arrested, along with six other occupiers, most en route to a town hall meeting in nearby John Day. There's a shootout with law enforcement. Ryan Bundy suffers a minor wound. After reaching for a 9mm handgun tucked into his jacket pocket, spokesman and Arizona rancher LaVoy Finicum is shot and killed. Following Tuesday's incident, Ammon Bundy tells his followers to go home. But four remain, along with a stockpile of guns. On Saturday, the Pacific Patriot militia called on supporters to swarm Burns.

The standoff in Oregon is not yet over. Burns residents are still facing off with self-proclaimed patriots downtown. Harney County's fire chief resigned, and in neighboring Grant County the sheriff has urged releasing the Hammonds.

But in other ways Harney County's underpinnings grow less secure. Here is a movement reveling in chaos, embracing the uncertainty of battle. Before his arrest, Ehmer tells me there's a "wild element" to the Bundy-led undertaking. "I like that element."

Cuba After the Thaw

By Michelle Chase, Boston Review

07 February 16

Will the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations mean worsening inequality for Afro-Cubans and women?

n December 2014 President Obama made the stunning announcement that he had used his executive power to negotiate with Cuba and would reestablish diplomatic relations with our erstwhile enemy. Throughout the subsequent year, the U.S. media focused on the more exciting aspects of reestablishing diplomatic ties: the long-overdue removal of Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism; the moving act of raising the flag above the reinstated U.S. embassy in Havana; and most recently, the sudden announcement of big business interests sitting down with U.S. and Cuban officials to negotiate compensation for properties expropriated by the revolution a half-century ago. Our official recognition of the Cuban government after fifty-five years of isolation, open aggression, and clandestine destabilization is extremely important and must continue.

Yet what already seems clear is that the renewal of U.S. relations will not automatically bring widespread prosperity, much less social equality, to Cuba. The December 17, 2014 rapprochement between Cuba and the United States came on the heels of several years of Cuban internal reform that have deepened inequality, stacking the deck of the new political landscape in favor of some Cubans. Not surprisingly, race and gender figure prominently in Cuba’s growing disparities.

Even the most measurable change so far this year—the spike in American visitors—may contribute to the island’s deepening inequality. The growing flood of U.S. tourists will inevitably provide new clientele for the restaurants, home-stays, and other urban services that are the bread and butter of Havana’s new upwardly mobile class of business owners, who tend to be light-skinned and often male, threatening to leave Afro-Cubans, women, and vulnerable groups, such as the elderly, behind.

Why has inequality gradually returned despite the revolutionary government’s stated dedication to creating an egalitarian society? The problem has deep roots. Far from being an island frozen in time, Cuban society has changed rapidly over the past fifty years.

In the heady revolutionary year of 1959, expectations ran high. Although Havana was known as the “Paris of the Caribbean,” much of the island was impoverished, a legacy of its history as a sugar colony where fortunes were raised on plantations fueled by African slave labor. With the revolution in power, historically oppressed Afro-Cubans and their allies pushed for redress, as historians Alejandro de la Fuente and Devyn Spence Benson have shown. An unprecedented national debate on race and racism followed in the mass media, at conferences and roundtables, and among new pro-revolutionary anti-racist organizations. Similarly, throughout 1959 women activists—including many affiliated with the Communist Party—formed new revolutionary women’s groups, sponsored conferences to discuss women’s rights, and presented their demands to the revolutionary leadership. It was exciting, effervescent, a time when it still seemed that the revolution might accomplish anything.

But by mid-1960, fearful of any social cleavages that might be exploited by growing internal opposition or the United States, the revolutionary government began to demand “unity.” In its drive to centralize political power, it shuttered independent organizations, even those that did not oppose the revolution. In mid-1960, all autonomous women’s groups were collapsed into the Federation of Cuban Women, a top-down mass organization that served mostly to transmit directives to women and mobilize them for the revolutionary cause. Autonomous Afro-Cuban associations of various kinds were dismantled by the mid 1960s. (Unlike the women’s groups, they were never replaced by a government-sanctioned Afro-Cuban mass organization.) These closures effectively removed formal organizational channels for dissenting or merely independent opinions on race and gender equity. Afro-Cuban religions, too, were pushed underground, where they survived and reemerged to flourish in the 1990s.

By 1962, the revolutionary government confidently asserted that it had eradicated all discrimination based on race or sex. Thereafter it became a political taboo—in fact, virtually counterrevolutionary—to suggest otherwise. It is true that the social programs undertaken by the government during the first few years of the revolution benefitted Afro-Cubans and women disproportionately, especially the expansions of healthcare, education, and professional opportunities. Yet certain underlying ideas and social practices were left intact. The more robust, widespread questioning of race and gender inequalities and ideologies that might have been spurred by Afro-Cuban and women activists in 1959 was a lost opportunity. These fault lines would reemerge in the 1990s...

In 1961, as U.S.-Cuban relations definitively ruptured, Cuba drifted into the Soviet orbit. The alliance with the USSR buoyed the Cuban economy for a time. But the relative abundance of the Soviet years, especially the 1980s, was supported by massive subsidies. The fall of the Soviet Union prompted an epic depression in Cuba in the 1990s, known as the Special Period, a traumatic decade that scarred the population and prompted thousands to attempt the dangerous passage to U.S. shores on rickety homemade rafts. The redistributive efforts of the Cuban state—roughly equal salaries, rationed foods, universal access to healthcare and education, and free or highly subsidized services—were eroded or rendered insignificant by the economic shock of the 1990s, never to recover.

Alejandro de la Fuente was among the first to document the return of racial inequality during the Special Period. The social schisms wallpapered over in the 1960s now returned with a vengeance in the 1990s. In the early 1960s much of the island’s middle and upper class, which were overwhelmingly white, decamped for Miami. There they established a powerful exile community, still largely white if now less affluent. In the 1990s they sent remittances—a crucial lifeline—to their family members on their island, who were also mostly light-skinned. The historic patterns of race and residence that the urban reforms had failed to disrupt were now monetized, as predominantly white neighborhoods converted their better housing stock into lucrative rentals. White, formerly middle-class Cubans mobilized the cultural capital still embedded in their social networks to jostle for jobs and scarce goods. Afro-Cubans were elbowed out of increasingly competitive positions in the tourist industry, one of the only ways to access hard currency (as opposed to Cuban pesos or convertible pesos, which have no convertible value). Racist ideologies, prohibited in public since the 1960s but maintained in private, now reemerged.

At the same time, the historic limitations of revolutionary measures to liberate women also came back to haunt Cuba. The revolutionary government had emphasized women’s entry into the public sphere yet did little to proactively remold the practices of the domestic sphere. Although the Family Code of 1975 stipulated that women and men should share domestic burdens equally, women continued to undertake the vast majority of domestic labor. Women’s double shift was taxing enough before the 1990s but, as the Spanish anthropologist Isabel Holgado Fernández documented, the hardships of the Special Period were particularly punishing for women. The shortages of necessary goods elongated reproductive labor excruciatingly. Cooking, Childcare, Standing in Line: this was the new “socialist triad” for women.

When I first began traveling to Cuba in the early 2000s, it felt like a society slowly recovering from a war or some other collective shock. The country was stabilizing, partly due to economic support from the government of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Cars and buses returned to the streets; market and store shelves were replenished. But survival stories were still fresh on people’s minds. My friends recounted how their families had made it through the darkest days of the Special Period. They told harrowing stories of the relatives and friends who had fled on rafts or even run over the land-mined border to the military base in Guantánamo. They shared memories of entire families sleeping camped along the water to weather the unbearable heat during long summer blackouts. Although life was improving for most Cubans, economic liberalization also slowed down, and many of the private restaurants and family-run bed-and-breakfasts lost their licenses and closed shop.

When Fidel Castro stepped down in 2007 following an illness, Raúl Castro began to slowly implement social and economic reforms. For a weary populace, many of these were welcome: the removal of restrictions on travel abroad; an open market in houses and cars; less emphasis on political mobilization and more on increasing efficiency and production.

The most recent round of reforms announced in 2011, know as the Lineamientos (Guidelines), marked a major economic restructuring: the state would gradually and permanently shed up to 40 percent of its workers. The private sector, once seen as something of a necessary evil, was now encouraged. The government released a number of newly approved private professions for which Cubans may solicit small business licenses. These recent reforms are consolidating the social inequalities that began to grow during the Special Period.

For reasons that were already becoming apparent in the 1990s, Afro-Cubans are far less able to take advantage of the current round of economic reforms. They more frequently lack family abroad to send remittances that could be used to either offset their low salaries in the state sector or to start a small business in the private sector. As anthropologist Katrin Hansing has recently argued:

Most successful, private businesses, whether paladares [family-run restaurants], bed and breakfasts, beauty parlors, nightclubs, yoga studios and gyms etc., are owned . . . by white Cubans. Homes in exclusive, overwhelmingly white, neighborhoods, such as El Vedado, Miramar and Siboney, are being bought and sold for exorbitantly high prices and being restored to their former glory with capital from abroad, furthering the association between wealth and whiteness.

Recent studies by Cuban sociologists such as Dayma Echeverría, Teresa Lara, and Ileana Díaz suggest that the current restructuring may also disproportionately affect women. Women tend to be overrepresented in the ongoing layoffs from state-owned businesses because they are clustered in services rather than in the strategic sectors of mining, agriculture, manufacture, or pharmaceuticals. Even when women are not laid off but instead reassigned internally within state entities, some sociologists speculate that women may be getting shuffled downward toward positions of lower pay and responsibility. In general, women—especially younger and less educated ones—are being left out of the formal workforce at greater rates than men, producing a pool of women the Cuban government dubs inactivas: neither employed nor seeking work, and not enrolled in school.

Once unemployed, women have a harder time than their male counterparts finding new jobs either in the state sector or the growing private sector. There are a number of reasons for this. Existing state-run job placement programs target certain groups that tend to be male, such as people finishing military service (which is mandatory only for men) or those recently freed from prison (mostly men).

In the private sector, men tend to be the licensed owners of the assets that form the foundation for most small businesses: agricultural plots, trucks, cars, and other goods. (An important exception to this rule is the large number of mostly white women proprietors who run small bed-and-breakfasts.) Men moreover may have easier access than women to private sources of credit and to the black market networks often essential to running a business in today’s Cuba. In addition, most of the state-approved occupations for small businesses are traditionally seen as masculine, such as taxi driver, farmer, or construction worker. Finally, many of the newly approved small business categories involve manual or artisanal labor, making them less attractive to professionals. The revolution’s much-lauded accomplishments in raising women’s rates of education—women are now 60 percent or more of college graduates—may have perversely left them ill-equipped for the niche markets of the new Cuba.

These discrepancies are reflected in statistics on the growing private sector. As of August 2011, less than a quarter of small business (cuentapropista) licenses were in the hands of women. Women are most likely to enter the private sector as employees, not business owners. Clearly, many women are also working in the private sector without licenses, probably mostly in food preparation, childcare, and as domestics. While this shelters them from the burden of paying taxes, it also prevents them from taking advantage of social security, which was updated recently to cover private sector employees. We may thus be witnessing a gradual “feminization” of unemployment, underemployment, and informal employment in Cuba.

The 2011 economic reforms have helped consolidate the emergence of a more dynamic and higher-paid private sector, largely male and light-skinned, part of a new elite that is best positioned to take advantage of the economic changes looming on the horizon. Recognizable patterns of poverty are also consolidating, marked by decrepit housing in far-flung neighborhoods with poor infrastructure, subsistence-level caloric intake, and lack of contacts to find job opportunities. Afro-Cubans are vastly overrepresented among the new poor, and single mothers and the elderly are especially vulnerable within this group.

As the United States and Cuba further their rapprochement, there is a danger that the future influx of investment capital, foreign companies, and American tourists will further these patterns rather than disrupt them. Ironically, the revolution’s long-overdue recognition by its northern neighbor may also hasten the demise of its fundamental project of social equality. December 17 may mark a Pyrrhic victory after all.

• • •

It is unclear what the next few years will bring. Between the electoral defeat of the Venezuelan left in December and the U.S. presidential elections slated for next fall, new developments may come haltingly.

When I visited the island in October, my first visit after almost four years, most of my Cuban friends flatly declared that nothing had changed since I had last seen them. Yet I could sense subtle differences percolating in their lives, especially in the various entrepreneurial schemes they had in mind. One friend contemplated opening a small juice stand in front of her house to take advantage of the morning commuters walking by. It would be a Cuban peso business, not a high-earning one, but something to complement her pension during her coming retirement. Another hoped to take advantage of the more relaxed travel regulations for a quick “fundraising” trip to Ecuador, in which he planned to bring back a light motorbike and some cell phones to resell at a large markup. (The Ecuadorian government’s recent decision to reinstate visa requirements for Cubans will likely have dashed his plans.)

On my last night in Havana a friend took me on a long walk past the dark and desolate piers where large cruise ships hailing directly from U.S. ports will soon dock. Beyond that, he gestured, was the port of Mariel, once best known for the mass exodus of 1980, and where an economic “free zone” is now in development. I was reminded of my very first visit to the island in 2000, when a woman I met recalled with a sudden burst of nostalgia the Soviet cargo ships you could see docking daily before the collapse of the Soviet Union left Cuban ports quiet. Havana’s sheltered bay—the raison d’etre for the city’s original settlement—will gradually be repurposed for mass tourism, waterfront condos, and high-end restaurants.

There are some Cubans who view the current moment as one of opportunity as well as risk. In November I attended a talk given by Afro-Cuban cultural critic Roberto Zurbano, who was visiting Rutgers University in Newark. He discussed various ways to inject conversations about race and Afro-Cuban empowerment into the current bilateral thaw. He was enthusiastic about future exchanges between civil society groups and institutions of higher education. He saw such exchanges as an opportunity for Cuba’s anti-racist struggle to find more transnational allies.

Later I asked him what, if any, changes he had noticed since “D-17.”  He cautioned that it was too early to tell; most change so far has been at the level of discourse. But he mentioned one unexpectedly positive effect of U.S. tourism, explaining that the uptick in African American travelers had already changed the dynamics of street-level policing. Havana cops were easing off their notorious harassment of black youths out of fear they might be North American tourists. “It’s a small detail, but for us it’s important. Because the authorities’ perceptions of blackness will keep changing as African American tourism grows.” It is an example of the kind of unanticipated effects that the coming years may bring.