That’s probably the best word to describe the comments from the pro-Castro side of the debate in this post and this post. I won’t bore you with the details except to make the following observations that are my opinion and…

Ahmed: Saul Landau is an old friend of mine and is much more than a “Pacifica ally.” One of the many things we disagree on is Cuba.

I particularly do NOT like the piece you have linked to. Of course no one committed to freedom is going to defend what has been done to Jose Padilla. Unfortunately, similar treatment is handed out on, yes, a systematic basis in Cuba to those likewise considered illegal combatants.

I also think is Saul is little too quick to dismiss the impact of the Herberto Padilla piece. Perhaps, indeed, no electro-shock on waterboards were used on the Cuban poet. But I dont know about you, but I think if I were a radical, a socialist, a fighter for freedom I’d be pretty god-damned fired up about putting a leftist poet in jail for 38 days for something he wrote! I dont want to be picky or anything, but if it happened to me I would damn well consider it a form of torture. Especially knowing that Im in a police state with no habeus corpus, no right to a speedy or impartial trial, and in facr no knowledge of what my crime was in the first place!

The Padilla affair in Cuba was cataclysmic and cast a chill for decades afterwards. Is Saul right that the cultural policies of the regime have been liberalized? Of course. This has been the case with most totalitarian regimes as they mature. Once the political opposition is crippled and cowed and there is no instititutional form of resistance available, you let some freaks grow their hair long and write some steamy novels. But as recently as 1992 I stood with Che Guevara’s own grandson on a Havana balcony just moments after his rock group had been tear-gassed off a community center stage because his music was considered degenerate.

Ahmed, it’s easy for you or me or Reg to condemn the inhuman treatment imposed on Jose Padilla. But I dont see that condemnation as some sort of ritual preliminary to state a whole number of equally obvious truths. Like:

1) Cuba is a dictatorship where all power is concentrated into the hands of one family. No organized political dissent — in action or in word– is tolerated.

2) There is a complete and total lack of basic civil liberties and rule of law in Cuba as well as any transparency or independence of the judiciary.

3) The individual Cuban citizen lacks any and all guarantees of security, privacy or redress against the state.

4) And while there is an admirable “social wage” paid to all in the form of abundant social services, it is likewise true that there is widespread economic hardship and ABSOLUTELY no right for workers to organize or bargain collectively.

Man, does this get boring…………………..

http://www.counterpunch.org/landau03292007.html

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Cafe revolutionaries ought to get off their ass? That’s something you should do, Cooper. Your ass is fatter than Jabba the Hutt’s. Nearly as fat as your rightwing, redbaiting mouth.

Leaving Haiti, Farmer didn’t stare down through the airplane window at that brown and barren third of an island. “It bothers me even to look at it,” he explained, glancing out. “It can’t support eight million people, and there they are. There they are, kidnapped from West Africa.”

But when we descended toward Havana he gazed out the window intently, making exclamations: “Only ninety miles from Haiti, and look! Trees! Crops! It’s all so verdant. At the height of the dry season! The same ecology as Haiti’s, and look!”

An American who finds anything good to say about Cuba under Castro runs the risk of being labelled a Communist stooge, and Farmer is fond of Cuba. But not for ideological reasons. He says he distrusts all ideologies, including his own. “It’s an ‘ology,’ after all,” he wrote to me once, about liberation theology. “And all ologies fail us at some point.” Cuba was a great relief to me. Paved roads and old American cars, instead of litters on the ‘gwo wout ia’. Cuba had food rationing and allotments of coffee adulterated with ground peas, but no starvation, no enforced malnutrition. I noticed groups of prostitutes on one main road, and housing projects in need of repair and paint, like most buildings in the city. But I still had in mind the howling slums of Port-au-Prince, and Cuba looked lovely to me. What looked loveliest to Farmer was its public-health statistics.

Many things affect a public’s health, of course—nutrition and transportation, crime and housing, pest control and sanitation, as well as medicine. In Cuba, life expectancies are among the highest in the world. Diseases endemic to Haiti, such as malaria, dengue fever, T.B., and AIDS, are rare. Cuba was training medical students gratis from all over Latin America, and exporting doctors gratis— nearly a thousand to Haiti, two en route just now to Zanmi Lasante. In the midst of the hard times that came when the Soviet Union dissolved, the government actually increased its spending on health care. By American standards, Cuban doctors lack equipment, and are very poorly paid, but they are generally well trained. At the moment, Cuba has more doctors per capita than any other country in the world—more than twice as many as the United States. “I can sleep here,” Farmer said when we got to our hotel. “Everyone here has a doctor.”

Farmer gave two talks at the conference, one on Haiti, the other on “the noxious synergy” between H.I.V. and T.B.—an active case of one often makes a latent case of the other active, too. He worked on a grant proposal to get anti-retroviral medicines for Cange, and at the conference met a woman who could help. She was in charge of the United Nations’ project on AIDS in the Caribbean. He lobbied her over several days. Finally, she said, “O.K., let’s make it happen.” (”Can I give you a kiss?” Farmer asked. “Can I give you two?”) And an old friend, Dr. Jorge Perez, arranged a private meeting between Farmer and the Secretary of Cuba’s Council of State, Dr. José Miyar Barruecos. Farmer asked him if he could send two youths from Cange to Cuban medical school. “Of course,” the Secretary replied.

Again and again during our stay, Farmer marvelled at the warmth with which the Cubans received him. What did I think accounted for this?

I said I imagined they liked his connection to Harvard, his published attacks on American foreign policy in Latin America, his admiration of Cuban medicine.

I looked up and found his pale-blue eyes fixed on me. “I think it’s because of Haiti,” he declared. “I think it’s because I serve the poor.”

You read me pretty close K. But your wiskey is about a ‘10′ too ‘High’.

None of whom appear to be emulating his political model either.

Reg didn’t you know that replacing light bulbs is an affirmative defense against crimes against humanity?

Nothing to read in Cuba? I guess you are not as impressed by Granma and Juventud Rebelde as I was.

I remember in film school we studied the flourish of excellent films by directors like Andrezej Wajda, Miklos Jancso, Milos Forman. They were a refreshing break from what we called “the boy meets tractor” school of Soviet doctrinaire realism.” Granma and Juventud Rebelde are cut from the same cloth.

As for diesel and gasoline, as Cuba gets much of its fuel from Venezuela, it’s worth noting that Venezuela is a major producer of sour crude oil, which has a high sulfur content, smells like sulfur and is a major producer of hydrogen sulfides.

Yummy

As for Castro not being an inspiration, you are simply incorrect. Check out the earful Andres Oppenheimer got when he tried to tell Indian economics students that Fidel and Chavez were bad models. or listen to what the leaders of the 100+ countries of the Non-Aligned movement had to say about Fidel. Or just pay attention when even Calderon in Mexico and Uribe in Colombia tell Bush to shove it when he tells them to play a harder line vs. Cuba and Venezuela. In 1991, you may have had an argument, but the world is changing. Fidel has to look around the world and feel pretty vindicated in 2007 (his friends now run Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Nicaragua – just missing Peru and Mexico by inches).

Look, only we Americans have this anti-Castro fetish. We are taught it at a young age and it is instilled everywhere. The reason our insitutions have done this is not because Cuba is a failure. It is because Cuba was and still is a remarkable example – a cancer to be removed as the US national security literature put it for 30 years (Chomsky). We don’t have covert terrorist and propoganda wars for 47 years because we want democracy so bad. I hope you can concede at least this much. You may not think so, but our best and brightest were scared sh*tless of a rising Cuba until the Soviet Union fell.

But without those remittances, they’d be screwed. Or is that more misinformation ?

My biggest problem with Castro isn’t that he stood up against the United States, but that his “revolution” did exactly zilch to provide anything remotely resembling a viable alternative development model for Latin America. The country has been walking on crutches for decades. They’ve wrapped any actual social achievements in areas like education and access to doctors for the poor in such an unattractive political package that virtually no one on the Latin American left would point to the Cuban system as a model – despite all of the bullshit rhetoric that Fidel spouted when he initiated what has amounted to a highly restricted project, founded on a bankrupt ideology and overseen by a caudillo.

But until then, you gave me some more totally incorrect facts to run with. That is all I’ve really been doing here. If correcting everyone’s misconceptions is defending Fidel, then I am guilty. But hopefully your readers aren’t so closed minded.

As for calories, I suspect you are referring to something done in 1992, at the height of Cuba’s Great Depresssion (they lost 40% of GDP – twice as bad as ours). Today the UN reports Cuba is the ONLY country in Latin America to have “come close to abolishing severe malnourishment.”As for the ration book – that is credited by the UN for the good numbers. They report that the ration book provides Cubans 53% (not 25%) of their total caloric and nutritional needs – for next to nothing. There are many other options for food than the black market, such as produce stands for goods grown on vacant lots in the neighborhoods of Havana (as sustainable as can be).

Nothing to read in Cuba? I guess you are not as impressed by Granma and Juventud Rebelde as I was. They only seem skimpy because there are no ads filling it up (the web version is only part of what is printed). The artists and writers have got Bohemia and la Caceta, those looking for humor have Dedete, their Time magazine is Trabajadores. i even saw a monthly English language mag when I was there… nevermind the dozens of local presses in every province and city. No news on TV? I can’t even believe you wrote that. Cubans complain of too much news, if anything. There are also top notch documentaries, up to date hollywood movies, I even was told the Simpsons are shown. For having no sources of information, the Cubans I met were quite up to date on things… much more than Americans for sure.

“Lack basic medicines” is an old refrain, without much truth. I am sure the odd US produced commercial products are hard to find (advil, mylanta) because of the embargo, but for a place with no medicines, they sure are healthy (we’ve already discussed their better health than ours). That is because for every pill of Robotussin they don’t have, they have something else that works as well. Plus lets not obscure the more basic fact that Cubans have FREE access to every essential piece of medical equipment you can find to treat anything.

As for productive sectors of the economy, head CIA honcho in Cuba for decades Brian Lattel, goes out of his way in his “After Fidel” book to argue that Raul’s armed forces have been running ran the most productive sectors of the economy – in areas of tourism and agriculture. The Cuban army is totally self-sufficient, ie. gets no state subsidy. Cubans have plenty of representation at work, to improve conditions (more than Americans at least). I’ve already tackled the issue of Cuban pay, which has doubled and at hotels is shared with the rest of the population.

If you went to Cuba you may get some agreements on some domestic criticisms, but I doubt many would feel anything but great pride in their foreign policy. First off, all Cubans abroad were volunteers from the army. With these heroes Cuba single-handedly stoppped the spread of racist regimes in southern Africa. They changed history without Soviet endorsement – or help. They alone countered the CIA wherever they were in Africa and Latin America, assisting democratic anti-imperialist governments in Algeria, Congo, Guinnea. Mandela claims apartheid would not have fell when it did without the Cuban assistance. Scholars go further and say Cuba is the only modern example of a truly idealistic foreign policy that worked. As far as Ethiopia goes, experts agree that without the critical injection of 15,000 troops to repel the Somali invasion, a good portion of Ethiopia would have been carved off, and the plans for a Greater Somalia, including attacks on DJidibuti and parts of Kenya, would have moved forward. It was not about Mengitsu, I don’t think he was even in power yet… it was about helping a helpless state from foreign invasion. Cuba gained nothing but the prestige of the world. Americans may find that worthless, but Cubans are a perhaps different breed.

Your last comment is perhaps the most troubling. While this one can
t be proven, I would say to imply that ANY Cuban on ANY street thinks people have it better in Haiti or Guatemala shows ignorance of toda’s Cuba. Cubans know they have difficulties, but they would not give up their solidarity, their justice, their equality, nor their first world social and cultural achievements for anything. I met several Cubans who believed their life is better in Cuba than it could possibly be in the US. They like to play hard and don’t work too much in Cuba you know… there is no worry about not paying rent like they hear from family in Miami.