World BEYOND War,
TFF Associate
For years, World BEYOND War and other peace groups from around the world had been attending peace conferences in Cuba. When I visited Cuba this past January it was with a visa for that purpose. I published here the remarks I made at the conference. We shouted as loudly as we could about January’s conference in websites, social media, emails, and media interviews. The notion that there could be anything wrong with it — or that some institution could punish us for it — never entered our minds.
Legally, you’re allowed to go to a peace conference in Cuba. Nobody has so much as hinted that I’ve done anything illegal. But on Thursday June 5th I got a bunch of letters in the mail telling me that on Monday June 9th the U.S. bank accounts of World BEYOND War and the private accounts of all of my family members would be closed without explanation. This was the action of a particular bank called First Citizens, with no indication of any involvement by any government. (The explanation, it would be made clear, was my visit to Cuba.)
Morally, it seems a useful thing to do — attending peace conferences in Cuba. As at similar conferences in many other countries, one can meet diplomats, authors, activists, and politicians from all over the world to discuss peace education, disarmament, negotiations, and cross-cultural understanding. Videos of the entire conferences in Cuba, like most others around the world, are posted online for all to see.
World BEYOND War works to abolish all war, and opposes all sides of all wars — an unusual position even at peace conferences. We are constantly working to persuade some people not to support the Russian side of a war and other people not to support the Ukrainian side. We oppose any and all war-making by the U.S., Cuba, or anyone else, without equating disparate sides or blaming victims in any actual wars. Some groups try to shut down weapons programs because the weapons don’t work well; we start with opposing those that kill the most. When Trump sends troops into Los Angeles, we don’t join the Governor of California in asking that soldiers and Marines do their work abroad; we ask people to think about whether such armed forces should invade anyone else’s city either. The nice thing about peace conferences is that we can advance these views nonviolently, disagreeing amicably.
The problem, apparently, for a U.S. bank, with Cuban peace conferences is that, as with many things in Cuba, the Cuban government is involved. The president of the country wanders into the panel sessions. While that has the potential to cause censorship, it also has the potential to educate decision makers. I’d like to see presidents wandering in at peace conferences in Washington and other capitals.
Of course, the U.S. government has been sanctioning and blockading Cuba for generations, for the stated illegal purpose of overthrowing the government but — as usual — with the result of strengthening it instead, and the actual illegal impact of impoverishing the Cuban people — whose impoverishment is then blamed on the Cuban government and used as an excuse to overthrow it. This cruelty from the North provides a handy excuse for all sorts of repression and awful governance by the Cuban government, just as with the Iranian government and several others.
But U.S. policies have been tweaked in recent decades. Policies toward Cuba were somewhat moderated when Barack Obama was U.S. president, and then returned to the bad old days during the Trump-Biden-Trump era — although, Biden did (in defiance of understanding) take Cuba off the list of countries not fully cooperating with the U.S. on opposing terrorism, while leaving Cuba on the U.S. list of countries supposedly sponsoring terrorism. Despite his campaign promises (or because of his devotion to consistently reversing them?) Biden’s Cuba policies were basically Trump’s.
What had changed between Obama and Trump? The U.S. has not offered any reason for keeping Cuba on a list of nations sponsoring terrorism. One would think that Cuba would have had to, you know, sponsor some terrorism. Formally and legally, there’s nothing there, but in media commentary, 2016 was not just the year of electing Trump, and the year of concocting Russiagate, but also the year in which the so-called Havana Syndrome was first diagnosed. That the U.S. government itself doubts the very existence of this syndrome and has never connected it to the Cuban government is beside the point. There’s a buzz about Cuba and something nefarious. And there’s an equally amorphous license to act.
On June 7, a U.S. television channel broadcast a live Broadway production of a play about the McCarthy red scare. In it, George Clooney, playing Edward R. Murrow, told someone that a new disturbing incident should be part of their news coverage. When told that the incident wasn’t an action by Senator McCarthy, Morrow replied “Isn’t it?”
Perhaps the U.S. government is ordering banks to do what they do and to keep quiet about those orders. If not, what’s at work is probably just the climate — a McCarthyite climate of wild accusations, firings, disappearances, deportations, military in the streets, and peace advocacy transformed into the new “communism,” now called “anti-Semitism.”
“Have you ever attended a meeting with any member of the Communist Party?” “Have you ever suggested that genocide in Gaza should cease?” These are not questions but threats. Formally, First Citizens BancShares has not told us in writing why we cannot sit at its lunch counter, and claims it does not have to. But here’s what we know:
World BEYOND War has publicly announced everything we’ve done for years. No employee of First Citizens has ever given any indication of knowing that or of having glanced at our website beyond pages we’ve directed them to in answering their questions.
When I was in Cuba, I tried to look at our account on the First Citizens website and was blocked from doing so. When I got back to the United States I was still blocked. I spoke with someone at First Citizens who demanded to see my airline tickets, after which, on February 3, she said they would reactivate my account. This was just the World BEYOND War account. There would be no mention of personal or family members’ accounts until they were shut down five months later.
On March 17, the bank sent this absurd set of questions about what business our nonprofit organization supposedly does in certain countries. We filled it out and returned it. Our answer to most of the questions was “None.”
On March 28, they emailed: “My team has a follow-up question for you. Can you please provide insight to the following: Please advise if World Beyond War chapters in Belarus, Cyprus, Pakistan, Ukraine and Venezuela, operate as independent entities, from World Beyond War, much like your website indicates is the case for the Afghanistan chapter? If this is not the case please provide additional detail/nature of the operating relationship, pertaining to each country.” We replied the same day (and pointed out that all but one of those chapters did not exist), and then heard nothing until we received those letters on June 5th.
Phone calls and emails on June 5th produced nothing helpful, so I went in-person to a nearby branch of the bank — not the most local one, the one that had put up a pretense of being human and accountable years before, prior to massive growth and corporatization and increasingly referrals of customers with questions to a distant headquarters. I met with two bank employees who were super friendly and who (it seemed) immediately upon discovering that I existed in the flesh decided the whole thing was an outrage that they would get to the bottom of.
One of them clicked and stared and clicked at their computer, and informed me that the people in the bank’s “Fraud and Risk” department believed I worked for the Cuban government. I asked her if it mattered that I never had and never would work for the Cuban government. She said they’d take care of it, and that in any event nothing would be done to our accounts soon without ample warning.
Later that day, she emailed: “I hope you are doing well! I spoke to our internal department, and we will not be able to keep the accounts opened including the accounts for your family members. On the 10th we will be closing the accounts and mailing cashiers checks via certified mail. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.”
They’d moved the date by one day. I had lots of additional questions, but got no answers.
Was it all about Cuba or had they discovered we opposed genocide? Or was it something else entirely?
Was the U.S. government threatening the bank, or was the bank just being careful, or was the bank just feeling empowered to act on the rightwing whims of its owners?
Was there somewhere some poor deluded soul who actually believed I was endangering them, that I might cause them to catch Havana Syndrome or something, but that such a deed would require more than the six months they’d spent contemplating giving us a few days’ notice?
We never got any other communication from the bank that it wouldn’t close our accounts on the 10th, by which date we’d managed to get the balances at or near zero. But it didn’t actually close the accounts until June 16th (sure would have been great to have known that was the plan a week earlier).
As this particular bank has grown worse over the years, other banks we’ve worked with and are newly trying to work with have grown — or we are hoping have grown — better, in terms of online tools, and in terms of divesting their money from the most horrible industries. World BEYOND War has never had much, and usually not any, money to invest in anything. We try to spend it all on our work. But we highly recommend trying to avoid having anything at all to do with a bank like First Citizens. One can only imagine how this bank treats non-citizens.
Friends are being shot at in Los Angeles, having their boats boarded by Israeli troops, risking starvation as they fast for peace, seeing their loved ones snatched and imprisoned for no reason. When World BEYOND War asked friendly organizations if they might help out in our little banking crisis, each one we asked was too scared or too busy with its own crises. Some said they didn’t want to be tainted by us. The fact that we’d done nothing wrong was irrelevant.
Could I expect some other nonprofit to risk its existence for ours? Of course not. Could I expect friendly local bank employees to risk their jobs by standing up to their corporate Pinkertons? Of course not. But can I go silent and fearful and not denounce and expose any part of this disturbing trend that I’m able to warn others about? Of course not.
Just normal existence these days requires calculating risks and some modicum of courage. It’s a safe prediction that if we slant our calculations a bit more away from cowardice, toward openness and decency, the outcome will be far preferable.
If you’d like to politely and reasonably let First Citizens know that you do not approve of its behavior please phone 866-322-4249 or email.
