This Socialist Senate Candidate from Ohio Went to Cuba. Here’s What He Saw

Liz Oliva Fernández: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Belly of the Beast. My name is Liz Oliva Fernández, and today we are going to be speaking with Greg Levy. Welcome to Belly of the Beast, Greg.

Greg Levy: Thank you so much. I’m so honored to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Liz Oliva Fernández: It’s a pleasure to talk to you today. Could you introduce yourself, please?

Greg Levy: My name is Greg Levy. I am an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the United States. And I am a candidate, an independent socialist candidate for the U.S. Senate in the state of Ohio.

Liz Oliva Fernández: Greg, what’s your story?

Greg Levy: I’m just a working class person. I was born in a housing project with working class parents who did their best to try to raise me on the third of six boys. So there was financial insecurity in my family, so I couldn’t go to college like I wanted to. So I ended up joining the military. And then as a young person, I was just exposed to so much. I had traveled with the military. I seen the invasions. I seen what the military does.

Liz Oliva Fernández: Greg, what made you decide to run for the U.S. Senate as an independent socialist candidate rather than work within the Democratic Party?

Greg Levy: In the last 5 to 6 years, I really fell in love with the process of organizing working class people in the United States. And from that, organizing my comrades in the PSL. They asked me to run, and I’m happy to do so. Unlike most politicians in the United States, where it’s kind of like a career trajectory, that’s just not my story. My story is that I am happy to organize with my comrades, and this is a part of a plan that we have collectively. And they enable me to kind of punch above my weight because of the fact that we’re all together.

Liz Oliva Fernández: The first time I heard about you, you were openly talking about being socialist, and being a socialist in the United States still carries a negative stigma. Do you believe voters in the U.S. are ready to support candidates who openly identify themselves as socialists?

Greg Levy: Absolutely, absolutely. I do understand the history of repression of the left in the United States. But in the last 20 years, there’s been a huge resurgence of socialism as an idea. And even with Bernie Sanders in 2016, he really ran as a socialist, and the people of the United States — he probably wouldn’t have won if he had not been sabotaged by the Democratic Party. So then comes the question of how democracy in the United States actually functions when it is the leaders of these private parties, controlled by billionaires, that actually make decisions about who can be nominated, who can be chosen. And to be honest, in the United States, they’re usually chosen by billionaires themselves. So let me just say that the United States’ so-called democracy is not a people’s democracy, for sure. They don’t want working class people to even vote. And the voting turnout in the United States is very low, and it’s very settled around certain classes of people — whole swaths of the electorate don’t even participate. So there’s a different system in the United States under capitalism.

Liz Oliva Fernández: Do you think that’s enough in order to win an election in the United States for the Senate?

Greg Levy: I don’t think that that’s enough to win an election. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to win. I don’t underestimate the challenge, but it’s necessary for human emancipation.

Liz Oliva Fernández: The State Department’s new report on Cuba accuses Havana of influencing the American left. You just traveled to Cuba. I read you were afraid of the consequences this could have.

Greg Levy: No, I’m not afraid. I am quite aware of the history of threats against those who speak honestly and criticize U.S. imperialism. But listen, we cannot get to the world that we need to be at if we’re moving from a place of fear. And those of us in the United States — what do we have to be afraid of? Marginalized and working class people in the U.S. are struggling and suffering right now, and we have to have people who speak out. And I’m not afraid. I will speak out just as long as I’m alive. It’s important that we don’t go out alone, that things happen to us and there’s no one to tell the story. I will not move out of fear. We have to do what is necessary.

Liz Oliva Fernández: What brought you to the island? Why was it important for you to go to Cuba despite that political risk?

Greg Levy: Well, we just talked about Marco Rubio and Donald Trump and what they said publicly about Cuba — trying to make support for Cuba criminal and trying to make it terrorism in the U.S. And when I saw that, that made me know that we have to go to Cuba. When we live in a state and we allow the state to speak on our behalf and we aren’t vocally opposed to it, in a certain way we are complicit. One of my heroes from Chicago, Illinois said: politics is warfare without weapons, and the blockade is warfare. Economic warfare against people — specifically the Cuban people — is dead wrong. And it’s a violation of sovereignty. And we have to speak out against it. Actually seeing the lack of power in hospitals — people are dying because of it. This is life or death. And the American people need to know that this is so wrong. This is wrong on such an intense level. This is evil. This is warfare. These are war crimes being committed by a criminal regime today. And so Americans have a responsibility to speak the truth. It is our tax dollars that are enabling and emboldening this fascist regime and this lawlessness that is being perpetrated on Cuba.

Liz Oliva Fernández: Can you give me a specific example of what you saw people in Cuba suffering because of U.S. policy?

Greg Levy: I was able to visit an assisted living facility in a country town. They had no power. It was an old school building that was converted into an assisted living facility for folks who basically had no family and no place to go. And the respect for human beings that I saw in that facility is something that is unmatched. I have never seen that in the United States.

Liz Oliva Fernández: Do those Cuba policies matter to people in Ohio, to people in the United States?

Greg Levy: The truth is that United States residents aren’t encouraged to know about Cuba. And if they do, they know about Cuba from the gusanos in Miami, who are right wing and reactionary.

Liz Oliva Fernández: After seeing Cuba firsthand, what is the one thing you would want people in the United States to know?

Greg Levy: The one thing that people in the U.S. need to know is that the Cuban people are a wonderful, beautiful human people and they do not deserve the hostility that comes from the U.S. And we as U.S. residents, we have to make a stand to stand on the right side of humanity. And we need to defend the Cuban people and Cuba’s ability to self-rule.