Cuba Si Cuba No
There’s a nice little punch/counterpunch up on The Nation website that you might want to check out.
It begins with an essay from Cuban government official Ricardo Alarcon lamenting the 45th anniversary of the death of radical sociologist C. Wright Mills. Alarcon’s point: if only we had more courageous voices nowadays like Mills.
The Nation’s Washington Editor, David Corn, has posted a response to Sr. Alarcon. Corn’s point: Surely you jest, Sir. Any writer that shows the sort of independence you admire in Mills winds up in your jails. I’m with David on this one.
March 26th, 2007 at 11:47 am
I’m with Corn as well. I’m not a Mills expert, but I would imagine Mills might have become quite disenchanted with Cuba had he lived long enough.
March 26th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Nice contrast, but this one is a no-brainer. Corn is right, by miles.
“The Power Elite” by Mills is still a gem to read.
March 26th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
They’re both right. If only we had more intellectuals like Mills – and of course, if such a person happened to be Cuban, they’d likely end up in prison.
Two insightful, fairly recent pieces on the man –
http://www.uni-muenster.de/PeaCon/dgs-mills/mills-texte/GitlinMills.htm
http://www.logosjournal.com/aronowitz.htm
And excerpts from his most influential book -
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Book_Excerpts/PowerElite.html
It’s kind of pathetic that Alarcon has to hark back to a book written when Castro had been in power for about a year and a half and make that popular manifesto appear the essence not only of Mill’s intellectual and political significance, but Mills himself as some sort of mythical Godot whose reappearance holds some key to diplomatic progress between Cuba and the U.S.
That was then. This is now. The terrain is radically different in ways that bode better for a new generation of pragmatic Latin American leftists – Hugo Chavez grudgingly included – than forty years ago when Guevarism was all the rage . If Alarcon’s looking for more modest real world harbingers on the “Listen Yankee” front, it appears that the godawful Dan Burton himself – co-author of the crackpot Helms-Burton legislation might be in the process of coming down from his tree. We’ll see…
March 26th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
(From my comment on the Nation site, where full citations are offered)
Mr. Corn does his readers a great disservice by misrepresenting the facts on Cuba and not stating the essential truth about these 24 jailed “independent journalists” – that they were neither independent nor journalists. If you read their case files, [ruleoflawandcuba.fsu.edu] it is clear that all had worked either directly with the US Government, or for one of their funded subsideraries. None could be called journalists with a straight face; they were anti-regime activists working within the US Government’s official “Plan for Transformation,” which explicitly calls for the US to cultivate and create so called indepednent jounalists and librarians for global PR reasons (it makes our embargo look better). Instead of working independently and internally (like many who are not in jail), these 24 issued one-sided “reports” for cash that ended up on Miami based websites and US human rights reports. Can you honestly expect any people with a committed enemy like Washington to allow such a thing? The US certainly does not allow agents of enemy governments to work here (check the names Carlos Alvarez, the Cuban 5 and Susan Lindauer for starters)
Besides the obvious lack of independence these 24 share, perhaps Mr Corn did not want to mention the links many of these had to USG funded groups like the Center for a Free Cuba, because he wrote about the fact that this group has been linked to terrorism vs Cuba (as has CANF). Also, USAID paid many of them, and the GAO report last month was not too kind to that program’s largesse and lack of oversight as well. Better to leave out such facts…
Corn also mistates the facts on internet usage in Cuba, mocking the US embargo as a red herring. In fact, the embargo restricts the net connection by 1000 times from what it should be without it. For now, the outdated satellite connection is too burdened to allow universal home access. Still, computer classes and the internet is available in every small town in Cuba, at public facilities. Even Cuba opponents like RSF admit there is no censorship on the Cuban web – and groups like OpenNet Initiative rank Cuba’s net freedom higher than the UK.
Finally, on Cuba’s social and cultural achievements, Cuba has achieved the second highest human development index (health, education, gender) for its GDP in the world – and ranks higher than the US in some categories. UNESCO had to retest Cuban school children because their scores were so much higher than other Latin countries…
March 26th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Mr. Corn is absolutely correct and I suspect that if Mills could see what is happening in Cuba today, his book on the Cubans might be very different. Corn did a good job!
Reg: “…pragmatic Latin American leftists – Hugo Chavez grudgingly included…”
Chavez? Pragmatic? reg, you have GOT to be kidding.
March 26th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Mills’ theories on the power elite placed him on the side of the Cuban Revolution at the time and certainly would today. His powerful research showed how inner mechanics of how the interests of business people, local (“free”) newspapers and political elites intersect to suppress the democratic will of the people. It was the classic piece of work that reads as a call for Revolution – nothing else is suffice to break up the cabal that will always work in the interest of the elites at the expense of the poor.
To compare the 24 in prison in Cuba with the likes of Mills is absurd. Until anyone can come close to showing how someone with Mills ideas and capacities would be in prison in Cuba (wiithout taking US money), please do. Otherwise the assertsions of Mr. Corn being “obviously correct” need more work. One seriously interested in the Cuban media, may do well to also read some of the harshly critical articles coming out of the Cuban press (Juventud Rebelde in particular) lately. Nor is the Cuban press afraid to print the endless parade of Western NGO criticism in its national newspaper and news shows. they are not afraid to recite the accusations about “lack of freedom” because every Cuban knows most of it is BS.
I know it is not in fashion right now, but I would suggest good liberals spend more time reflecting on Mills’ points and decrying the results on the rights of “unpowered” billions around the world (and in this country), rather than sticking their neck out over 24 people who made a decision to sacrifice their rights when they took a paycheck from an enemy government.
March 26th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
I see the Venceremos Brigade has arrived.
March 26th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Mills alienated some leftists late in life by not slavishly praised people like Castro. One asked if there was anything he believed in. Mills, a motorcycle buff, pointed to a certificate on his wall attesting that he had comnpleted the BMW factory Mechanic’s course and replied, “German engines!”
March 26th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Leftside’s apologia insults the intelligence. I wonder if he could take the time to cite us the name of a single, living prominent Cuban investigative journalist?
I know several. They all now live in mexico, spain and (gasp) miami.
I also imagine, by his account, that Cubans — or at least a lot of Cubans– are pretty dumb. Here they are with the highest of human development indexes and yet still willing to sit on a raft on a shark infested channel to get out. Whats wrong with them?
P.S. Of the many times I have been in Cuba I have always heard the stories about how brave Juventud Rebelde is. Just so you know, many of those exiled journos I refer to worked precisely at JR.
I also wonder if Leftside believes that Americans who went on the Venceremos Brigade and therefore were 100% subsidized by the Cuban government should be put in jail as foreign enemy agents once they arrive back the U.S. That’s the implication of his arugments/
March 26th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Good on David Corn and Marc Cooper.
March 26th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Bad on The Nation for giving that thug a forum. Imagine if the National Rview ran an essay by P.W. Botha on Natan Sharansky.
March 26th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
(last to first) Covering the expenses of volunteer worker groups (cutting cane, building housing, etc.) is not quite the same as getting paid for writing one-sided BS on US Govt websites. But we’ll let readers decide.
That some 30,000 Cubans come to the US (mostly legally) does not negate their high human development. The number of migrants is proportional to pre-Castro numbers and peanuts compared to Mexico, C. America, Poland, Phillipines, Hispanola, etc. There are just as many (or close, depending on the year) Haitians, Ecuadorians and Dominicans rafting to the US than Cubans, despite the much further distance and lack of special treatment that Cubans receive (wet foot dry foot = citizenship & assisitance). Because these other rafters are not shown on the news channels, Americans can be forgiven for not knowing the facts (from US Coast Guard stats).
Please forgive me if I can’t rattle a Cuban “investigative reporter” off the top of my head. I’d have hard enough time naming an American one (no offense). But I suppose any of the authors of the 4 articles I have read in JR lately would qualify (since they’ve gone english). There were stake-outs of dozens of state run enterprises reporting on corruption, there was a reporter who tagged along with 6 or 7 Cubans doing “illegal” things for fun in the evening, as well as the famous recent piece (and Union organizing) that resulted in a hard-line Castro Radio and TV appointee to be rescinded.
Please tell us the names of your friends in Miami, Mexico and Spain. I’d be interested in the work they are doing today – and their stories.
March 26th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
“Chavez? Pragmatic? reg, you have GOT to be kidding.”
Relative to the Guevarist period of Latin American leftism, I’m not kidding one little bit. I don’t like Chavez, I think his “model” isn’t worth much because he’s got huge oil profits not available to most countries with similiar development problems, and I find his public image to be more than a bit buffoonish, but the notion that he’s devoid of pragmatism is, with all due respect, kind of nuts. Sort of like the notion that he’s simply a dictator imposing some sort of Stalinist – or even Castroite – model on Venezuela. There’s complexity in the Chavez story. Frankly, I think that Chavez is more in touch with some version of pragmatism than the crap regime that you’ve been touting as a great deal for America lo these many years, i.e. the BushCo crowd.
March 26th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
“Imagine if the National Rview ran an essay by P.W. Botha on Natan Sharansky.”
That’s an odd “imagine” since the National Review shamelessly apologized for apartheid when it was a reality. They fronted for far worse than Botha.
March 26th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
Regarding Chavez and “pragmatism” –
“(Venezuela) remains the fourth largest oil supplier to the United States. Pulled largely by those rising oil revenues, trade climbed 36 percent in 2005, to $40.4 billion, the fastest growth in cargo value among America’s top 20 trading partners, according to WorldCity, a Miami company that closely tracks American trade.
But American companies are also benefiting, as Venezuela’s thirst for American products like cars, construction machinery and computers has steadily grown, rising to $6.4 billion last year, from $4.8 billion a year earlier.” NYTs, 8/16/2006
Yeah, that flaming revolutionary Chavez is really sticking it to the Yankees with those…uh…speeches.
March 26th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
“They fronted for far worse than Botha.”
a. Examples, please
b. In this case, can we say that The Nation is “fronting” for castro?
March 26th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Leftside… ur answer is ridiculous, almost as ridiculous as me spending time debating the obvious to you. As long as I can remember, and when it has fit the purposes of the regime, critcism of the mgmt of indusrty and of econ corruption have appreared in the press.
But to deny that there’s an absolute lack of freedom of expression and of the press in Cuba puts you right in the same category as fundamentalist flat-earthers. Any magazine like The Nation, which calls for the impeachment of the head of state, would be shuttered in 1 hr in cuba and its editors prosecuted for treason.
Anyway, not going to argue it with you anymore. Its exactly the same as arguing with a bible-thumper. You obedience to the party libe, however, makes you an excellent candidate te become editor of any Cuban publication.
March 26th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Example please…
“the whites are entitled, we believe, to pre-eminence in South Africa.” NR editorial, April 1960
March 9, 1965 NR column by conservative founding father Russell Kirk – Kirk began by making a direct link between the United States and South Africa. In the United States, he wrote, the Warren Court’s notion of one-man/one-vote “will work mischief—much injuring, rather than fulfilling, the responsible democracy for which Tocqueville hoped.” But America, Kirk believed, was vigorous enough to survive such folly. South Africa was not: “this degradation of the democratic dogma, if applied, would bring anarchy and the collapse of civilization.” Repeating South African propaganda, Kirk maintained that blacks were not fit to govern themselves. Only a minority of the various races in South Africa, Kirk wrote, was “civilized.”
On August 1, 1986, William F. Buckley, Jr., advised the United States to forget about the “one-man/one-vote business.”
(clipped from The American Prospect – 1/1/98 – Apologists Without Remorse: American Conservatives on South Africa.)
Simple Answers to Simple Questions: “b. In this case, can we say that The Nation is ‘fronting’ for castro?” No. Corn’s rejoinder is proof of that. They are “fronting” for diverse opinion.
March 26th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
yet still willing to sit on a raft on a shark infested channel to get out
Point made, though one problem with this example: give automatic employment authorization (i.e., refugee status) to the residents of any country in this hemisphere, they’d come en masse, dictatorship or no. In other words, Cuba’s dictatorship is certainly a motivating factor for mass exodus, but then so is the promise of permanent residence in the United States. Just imagine if, say, Guatemalans were suddenly allowed refugee status (even in the current “wet foot dry foot” instantiation as applied to Cubans). Mass exodus, my friend. No question about it.
Shorter point: correlation does not equal causation.
March 26th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
I’m not gonna get into this one, except to say that like many systems, the Cuban state has many different factions, and progressives should urge people like Alarcon to be heard above the din.
Perhaps Mr. Alarcon can respond…Marc you know Saul Landau, get him to get Alarcon to continue the conversation.
March 26th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Yes, Marc, let’s have Alarcon reply. I’d be happy to go another round on this. And I believe the readers of The Nation and this blog might enjoy that. I would ask that Alarcon agree to post the exchange on whatever Cuban website he likes, but I would (obviously) not make that a condition.
March 26th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
I don’t know how pragmatic Chavez is but his country’s oil company – Citgo – sure is. Its US interests are represented by the law firm that has Rudy Guiliani as a partner.
March 26th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
Oh, and I suspect that little “Factoid” is unknown to loyal viewers of FOX news. I note that over the weekend their programs (Hannity, O’Reilly) decided that the big story was the “Evils” of Spring Break (Guess Xmas is safe for the timebeing). And with the announcement today that Anna Nichole Smith died of a drug OD I have a feeling we know what their top story will be tonite,
HINT: It won’t be the DOJ employyee taking the fifth!
(And yes, I suspect that Anna N. will be big news on CNN and MSNBC but you know they’ll mention that other little bit)
March 26th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
David.. An excellent idea but it ain’t gonna happen. I think Mr. Alarcon prefers unilateral venues.
March 26th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
one man/one vote: Is it now the “left” position to abolish the U.S. Senate? Or, for that matter, the United Nations General Assembly?
March 26th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
To all who would intellectually pummel Mr. Alarcorn, joking about “unilateral venues” and such…
I assume that you more or less consider yourselves “dissenters” and critics of your government. At the same time, you probably know of honorable people working “on the inside” to have a positive influence. Big difference between tthe Wilsons and the Bushes, right?
Why can’t you extend the same respect to Alarcorn, who is a part of a more progressive faction of the leadership of a flawed country.
March 26th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
“one man/one vote: Is it now the “left†position to abolish the U.S. Senate?”
Bob, assuming that’s some sort of response my giving you the examplesyou requested of nauseating racist twaddle that NR has peddled over decades, you’re proving to be just one more right-wing moron who’s predictably full of shit.
March 26th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
As a “ridiculous,” “fundamentalist,” “flat earther,” “bible-thumper” I should know when I’m trying to get pushed asisde. As I stated here last time, when the trick was tried, I never claimed the Cuban media is as “free” as ours. Of course freedom under capitalism has a totally different meaning than the one you ascribe. State ownership of the media is preferable for many reasons, but must be independent as well. In Cuba the “freedom” of the press indeed varies, for mostly legitimate national security reasons (ie. US threats, Castro’s health).
For the record, I don’t believe you can argue working US journalists are “free” to publicly back Cuba or call for radical change in the US either. Is there one? Capitalist editors are slaves to the lowest common denominator, which mostly precludes serious discussion at all. But the US political space is so limited that any socialist idea is automatically excluded from even being discussed. Even on”progressive” blogs apparently.
Alacron has never backed down from a debate or hard questions. I doubt he would resist defending himself from the hit job in the Nation.
March 26th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Jcummings: Ive known Alarcon for years. What makes you think he’s on the iside track of a “progressive” faction. His job has always been the same: be the soft-spoken fact that deals with Americans. Period. (He sure doesnt have to spend much time as head of he Natl Assembly except for refilling the ink pad on the rubber stamp). Alarcon has always been a totally faitfhful mouthpiece for the official line.
There have been others, indeed, who have tried to work some change from the inside. One who comes to mind is Roberto Robaina. But Robaina’s big error was to become too popular. And in Cuba, as we know, there’s only One Diva.
Alarcon, by contrast, is a hand-maiden.
As to Leftside, someone else argue with the guy, please. Or betetr, just continue to ignore him. I love how he says freedom of the press “varies” in Cuba. What freedom of the press?
I’ll take a capitalist editor anyday over a Stalinist.
March 26th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Alarcon reminds me of that soviet-era Russian commentator, Vladimir Posner, who was extremely skilled at framing stock government propaganda for an American audience, adding just enough suggestion of distance from a hard line around the edges to make it palatable.
March 26th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
The Department of Defense has identified 3,229 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the deaths of the following Americans yesterday:
BOGRETTE, Henry W., 21, Cpl., Marines; Richville, N.Y.; Combat Logistics Battalion 6, Second Marine Corps Logistics Group, Second Marine Expeditionary Force.
ROBERTS, Trevor A., 21, Lance Cpl., Marines; Oklahoma City; Fourth Marine Division.
March 26th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Reg, Posner was mostly shilling for Gorbachev, a far better man than Reagan.
March 26th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
Post Fidel, I’d rather see a progressive intellectual like Alarcon than Raul Castro. The party line can be quite broad, and from what I can see there are real differences.
March 26th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
As I recall, Posner was shilling for whoever was in power well before Gorbachev arrived on the scene…although I’m certain from reading his comments after the fact that his personal views were more closely aligned with Gorbachev’s. I think he’d been born in the U.S. and spent most of his formative years here. Can’t recall the details.
March 26th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
I’d rather see Alarcon than Raul as well. I don’t doubt that Alarcon is more open-minded. But if it’s Raul, Alarcon can no doubt be counted on to sugar-coat it. I doubt that Alarcon has developed an autonomous base of power in the party and related infrastructure that could challenge Raul. If we see such a development, it’s likely to be led by someone who we haven’t heard of or who’s less predictable and with less longevity – although Alarcon can probably be counted on to align with “progressive” or liberalizing forces if they look to become dominant. Which suggests why I don’t expect him to be the catalyst for a reform movement.
March 26th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
David Corn reads this blog?
a) How cool, I’ve read and admired his work since the 1980s
b) Poor David, having to sift through tripe such as the above
March 26th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
It’s true Alarcon’s English skills (and blond-grey hair) have helped him communicate with the US and EU. But he is no leader. Fidel is coming back in no time, to the . Some major reforms will go through thereafter, the result of the studies Cuban economists have been doing. Fidel will slowly give up power and positions and the Council of State will eventually choose a new President. Smooth and stable is what we’ve seen and what will continue… to the chagrin of 90% of American Cuba watchers (and Cooper I’m sure.. ).
Mr. Corn, did Alarcon know you were going to counter his article (rather lowly) in the Nation? If not, is this standard practice at the Nation? I’d hope the Nation would open space for a rebuttal.
March 27th, 2007 at 3:48 am
I try to avoid getting too involved in these discussions because I have little background in Latin America, but I sure can spot a propagandist when I see one. I see one in this last post from leftside. “Fidel is coming back in no time…” (some of that seems to be missing.) Now, how would leftside know that? And how does he know those major reforms will be approved by Cuba’s representative bodies? And how does he know that Fidel will slowly give up power? Perhaps because he has seen how Stalinist states do it in the past.
March 27th, 2007 at 6:47 am
MB,
Like I said, the Venceremos Brigade has arrived.
March 27th, 2007 at 7:11 am
Leftside refers to “some major reforms” – this has nothing to do with the fact that Raul is an admirer of Chinese capitalism, now does it? Alarcon on the other hand seems far more commited to socialism than others in the leadership.
March 27th, 2007 at 7:58 am
On March 26, Marc comments:
I also wonder if Leftside believes that Americans who went on the Venceremos Brigade and therefore were 100% subsidized by the Cuban government should be put in jail as foreign enemy agents once they arrive back the U.S. That’s the implication of his arugments/
I have gone to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade (yes, I guess we have arrived) and think the analogy is ridiculous.
The following would be the real analogous situation:
The Cuban National Assembly passes a law mandating that monies be given to dissidents in the US for the purpose of ‘peacefully’ overthrowing the economic and political system in the United States. (The Helms Burton Law says the same about money allocated for these purposes in Cuba).
Let’s assume Cuba suddenly became very wealthy and could allocate a proportional amount as the US has allocated against Cuba($80 million or so not including CIA money) – what’s a fair comparison? The US is 10 times bigger – so maybe $800 million?
But even if it were only $800 given to a recipient of the Cuban money in the US, it would be illegal under a variety of US laws. Like Cuba, our country also has laws against receiving money from a foreign country (any country) for the purpose of interfering in our political process – let alone for the purpose of overthrowing our poltiical system (remember the allegations in the 1990′s about the Chinese government officials giving money ot the Democrats?). And don’t forget the US laws requiring registration as a foreign agent if you take money – or provide services – for a foreign government. And then, of course, there is an entire US law “Trading with the Enemy” directed at anyone in the US who accepts any money or gifts or services from Cuba for any reason whatsoever!
The US recipient of such funds would be in jail and I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Marc’s demand for his or her freedom.
We need to end our own government’s 47 year (mainly violent) efforts to overthrow the Cuban government. We must demand our own rights to travel there (forbidden by George Bush not Fidel or Alarcon).
Bob Guild
March 27th, 2007 at 8:31 am
Amidst all the putdowns of “leftside” by Cooper and Corn above, I note that none takes on the fundamental point. The central “fact” of Corn’s article is the imprisonment of several dozen “journalists” in March 2003. These people were tried and convicted under existing laws (unlike, say, those imprisoned on the extreme eastern end of Cuba) of being paid agents of a foreign government whose stated foreign policy is “regime change,” i.e., the overthrow of the government in question (that wasn’t the precise legal charge, but certainly the essence of the matter). Such arrests have nothing whatsoever to do with the state of journalism in Cuba.
As far as Internet usage in Cuba and the general subject of the relationship of technology and the state, I strongly commend to readers this article by Jose Vidal, the coordinator of the mass communication program at Cuba’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center and full professor at the University of Havana:
http://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5943&news_iv_ctrl=1015
March 27th, 2007 at 8:36 am
The other article which is essential reading on the subject, required for anyone wishing to form an opinion on the arrest of the “journalists,” is this article, a transcript of a presentation by Fidel Castro in April, 2003 with a detailed chronology of events. It covers the arrest of the “journalists,” as well as the controversial application of the death penalty to three hijackers (warning: the article takes a long time to load, no doubt due to the restrictions on Cuban bandwidth to the Internet imposed on it by the United States, one day to be circumvented by the new fiber optic cable to Venezuela)
March 27th, 2007 at 9:10 am
I’ll stick to credible, independent sources, thank you.
March 27th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Hey I thought the only legitimate revolutionary Marxist leader was in North Korea! Least that’s what I hear from Bob Avakian. Who’s this Castro guy?
March 27th, 2007 at 10:04 am
Credible independent sources, I might add, that have criticized prisons on all ends of the island.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:16 am
There isn’t the slightest comparison between the prisons on the different ends of the island.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:20 am
Thanks for the link, Randy. Creepy that the pro-Cuban policy folks are just parroting the government charge, as if the accusation (and kangaroo cour trial) that journalists are acting, “in the interest of a foreign state, carries out an act which has the objective of harming the independence of the Cuban state or its territorial integrity,” were enough to convince us that such chargers carried truth, and that subversive thought and promotion, without recommendation of violent, deserves punishment. I thought leftists thing on such chapters in American history with perturbation.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Funny…that link loaded instantly. Guild, leftside, et. al. look, frankly, like complete idiots. Their analogies to violations of things like U.S. campaign law or the registry of foreign agents, etc. would hold a couple of ounces of water if this charade of defending particular prosecutions wasn’t played against a backdrop of decades of political repression in Cuba that is fully documented.
Cuba is a classic one-party state with a failed political and economic strategy. I was open to this kind of bullshit forty years ago when both I and Castro’s project were a lot younger. When Fidel fronted for the Soviet’s invasion of Prague as “defense of socialiam”, it should have become clear to anyone who cares about such things what political limitations the Cuban “revolution” embodied. Castro threw in his lot with an ideology that fueled some of the most brutal regimes and monumental social and economic disasters of the 20th century. While there’s no excuse for the U.S. policy toward Cuba – which is a product of America’s moron class – neither is that anachronistic policy an excuse for all of the bullshit Castro persists in putting his people through. It’s a cliche, but I’m convinced he needs our morons to justify his own dubious legacy.
At this point, apologia like what we’ve been treated to here is just pathetic. The last word on Castro is that during the missile crisis of 1961, it’s evident from his own admissions and from publication of Kruschev’s papers that Fidel lined up with ultra-reactionary General Curtis LeMay in his disdain for the backdoor negotiated settlement that averted a likely nuclear war. Stunningly megalomaniac, wildly irresponsible, hopelessly mired in multiple failures on both the political and economic front and, today, essentially irrelevant. He should simply be treated like the museum piece he is, rather than a threat to anyone other than the eventual progress of his own people toward a more sustainable system that doesn’t rationalize a police state and rule by a bureaucratic elite willing to mouth the only permissable ideological nostrums with relatively impressive infant mortality statistics.
Great way of promoting social and economic alternatives for poor folk in Latin America, fellas – by wrapping progress in health care or education in an unpalatable record of poor overall economic performance, dependence on polically-motivated aid from one (now non-existent) superpower and a reviled community of exiles’ remittances to their relatives from another, poverty-level incomes, political repression and one-party rule.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:23 am
A steadfast Bush supporter was once asked what Bush would have to do to lose her support, and she replied, “Withdraw from Iraq.” For the die-hard Castro loyalist I imagine the answer would be “Open a stock exchange.”
March 27th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Let’s get one detail out of the way. Bob Guild works for or runs Marazul charter tours which organized flites to Cuba. Ive used it many times and have referred him plent yof clients and I dont think our intent was to subvert the Cuban government.
That said, the suggestions made about the 24 people in jail are classic, Stalinist distortions fit for Soviet Show trial. How are these folks and what did they do?
They are non-violent, totally public anti-regime activists who, for the most part, set up small lending libraries of outlawed literature in their living rooms. NO ONE has argued that the material incited to violence — it was merely critical of castro or even less was just among the many books banned by idiot censors.
No question, either, that NGO agencies linked to the US government provided them with some minimal financial support– none of which was secret. Personally, I thin this is one of the FEW good things US policy has achieved in Cuba. Good, but stupid, as it provded justification for the crackdown.
But the bigger moral issue here, is that if the Castro apologists have a problem with AS AID or NED financing micro libraries, then why didnt they push for the Cuban state to lifts its totaliarian ban on free expression.
During the days of the Pinochet dictatorship, by the way, the Chilean regime also outlawed opposition press. I didnt feel I was violating Chilean soverignty when I violated that ban and brought stuff to friends. Nor was I outraged that the US government, in its meek away, also chipped away at that ban with some minor steps.
Also, many of those 24 jailed dissidents did indeed have a PUBLIC meeting with the U.S. charge d’affais. And so what? If u were in their position you would take support from anyone who would offer it to you. Was that a smart move? Evidently not, but I dont find it morally contemptible.
The last time I saw Ricardo Alarcon was in the Cuban UN Offices in New York, He had invited me and someone else from the Nation to come to Cuba and so some pro-Cuban peces. He certainly made all of sorts of in-kind donations possible to achieve that work, I declined.
Whats different between his role and that of US Charge d’affairs?
What’s absolutely disgusting here is to watch comfy Castristas from their safe lodgings in the U.S. slander, vilify, and celebrate the jailing of 24 pretty average people… some of them social democrats.. some of them christians.. some of them conservatives no doubt– when their only real crime is a thought crime. Shame on you for not standing with the weak against the powerful, with those jailed against their jailers and for ultimatelty defending a political system that robs all invididuals of their basic dignity by taking their voice and their thoughts away from them.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Incidentally – and this is probably a mere quibble in the light of the overall picture of Cuban “justice” – but there’s something very unseemly for a “maximum leader” like Castro to intervene and turn an already dubious judicial process into a matter of vindicating his political imperatives. He comes off as some measure of bully and buffoon. No wonder Hugo Chavez has such an affinity for him.
March 27th, 2007 at 11:05 am
“And so what? If u were in their position you would take support from anyone who would offer it to you. Was that a smart move? Evidently not”
You answered your own question, Marc. It would be akin to a terrrorist suspect in the U.S. accepting legal funding from al Qaeda–very, very stupid.
March 27th, 2007 at 11:15 am
There isn’t the slightest comparison between the prisons on the different ends of the island.
Thanks, but I’ll go with the credible, independent source and not an apologist.
March 27th, 2007 at 11:18 am
Marc, your point of view would seem a hell of a lot more principled if you actually condemned the actions of the charges’ d’affaires, as opposed to at one point or another, implicitly defending it, comparing it to Americans cutting sugarcane, etc. Why can’t you condemn US meddling in Cuban affairs, which only discredits any genuine opposition?
I don’t believe that Cuba responded wisely, but, like the Brits who were used to provoke Iran in recent days, these people were duped, and the guilty parties are the ones who set policy. I’m against jailing journalists of any kind, no matter who funds them. But you have to approach this with eyes wide open.
March 27th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Randy –
Do you really believe that Cuba does anthing remotely approaching the US’s international network of torture camps, of which Gitmo is one example? Even if they watned to, they couldn’t. And they sure as hell don’t.
March 27th, 2007 at 11:24 am
I think this discussion is getting too hung up on details. Is there press freedom in Cuba or not? Is there freedom to criticize the Castro government or not? Case closed.
March 27th, 2007 at 11:44 am
J cummings,
I believe what AI says about both the US and Cuba. I don’t believe what Eli Stephens says about Cuba.
Please don’t read anything further into that and don’t put words in my mouth.
March 27th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Next up at The Nation. The Greening of America: Forty Years Later, by Robert Mugabe
March 27th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Not to defend what is going on at Gitmo, which in my mind id indefensible, but there is an important distinction here: the Red Cross has visited Gitmo. Cuba is the only nation in the Western Hemisphere that will not allow visits from the Red Cross.
March 27th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Randy, your first comment was defensible, but thats just bullshit…yeah they give potemkin tours to the Red Cross…but the sheer gravity of it cannot for a moment allow one draw even slight moral superiority of Gitmo over Cuban prisons.
March 27th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Oh piffle. I’m not asserting any moral superiority, so again, stop putting words in my mouth.
Instead you should ask yourself this: why will Cuba not allow any visits at all. Why have they not allowed AI or HRW to visit since 1989?
No one’s trying to assert moral superiority here JC. I’m just dealing with facts as I know them through credible sources.
March 27th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
That begs the question then – what is worse – potemkin tours of “facilities” or no tours at all?
March 27th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Cooper says the US Govt. providing funding to USAID, NED and IRI to give grants to Miami-based organizations (who then sometimes pass it along to Cuban dissidents) is “one of the few good†policies we have towards Cuba. No wonder we butt heads. Cooper may want to look into why everyone who had anything to do with those programs resigned en-masse since the blasting these programs got in a recent GAO report (for lack of adequate records, oversight, massive waste and fraud). In addition the programs are totally ineffective. If the US really wanted to help a democratic opposition flourish on the island, is making them de-facto foreign agents a good idea in a place where nationalism is king? The only way this program makes sense is if your real goal is to produce headlines of supposed Cuban repression in Western newspapers (no US newspaper report I ever saw even dared try to obtain any relevant facts about any of those jailed from the public case files. If anything they say “the US denies Cuba’s charges†and leave it at that).
Some want to look big picture. Isn’t the real untold story in Cuba of the last 8 months how the number of “dissidents†is tiny in Cuba and apparently unwilling to challenge the regime? Don’t you think if there were a real authentic grass-roots opposition we might have seen some semblance of that arise?. Even hard line elements like Roger Noriega are saying elections would not be good enough (because surely Fidelistas would win).
Nobody was arguing the 24 were violent Marc. But invoking them as quiet librarians is a stretch. The American Library Association, facing a lot of heat, went down to Cuba to check on the charges made by Marc of censorship and therefore the legitimacy of these “independent libraries.†What they found is zero evidence of censored books. In fact most of the supposedly banned books on lists provided by exiles were right there in Jose Marti central library, many of them checked out. The lack of some books in the Cuban collection is not evidence of censorship, but prudent librarian selection, they found. As for the so-called independent librarians, the ALA found they all declared themselves “political dissidents,†were not trained librarians, nor were their collections advertised with signage or open to the public regular hours. The collections have not been disturbed by authorities and they have been helped by foreign governments and organizations…
Your “exposing†of Mr. Guild (and before that Walter) is far more Stalinist than a President explaining the arrests and charges to the people (covering them up might better fit that mold). Just so it is clear, I do not condemn those morally in Cuba who feel they are better off earning a living from foreign embassies. But neither will I call them “independent†nor above the law. They knew exactly what they were getting in to. The regime has made this red line very apparent. When the US gets rid of Helms-Burton and the Cuban Adjustment Act, then I will join the call for the Cubans to rid itself of Law 88… implemented in response to those two illegal pieces of legislation that make Cuban citizens pawns of our nefarious foreign policy objectives.
BTW – If you would have taken any payment (material or otherwise) from the Cuban Government, you would have been guilty of trading with the enemy. I am not a lawyer and don’t know how “in-kind donations†fall, but everyone should know the receipt of one peso from the Cuban Government is illegal and will land you 8 years in Federal prison. Cuba’s more lax policy is what is at the center of Corn and Cooper’s original (weak) argument.
March 27th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Well, there’s always the possibility that a little light will sneak out when someone is looking, whereas nothing will sneak out if no one is able to look.
March 27th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Some links (bolded above) did not get linked. Here they are:
American Library Association report on Cuba http://www.ifla.org/faife/faife/cubareport2001.htm
Roger Noreiga at AEI: http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.1471/transcript.asp
Also, here’s a link on the 6 high level Cuba folks from USAID, State and Intel who have resigned (or been forced out) in recent weeks. Very odd…
http://aviewtothesouth.blogspot.com/2007/03/top-us-experts-on-cuba-resign-en-masse.html
March 27th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Cummings.. have you been to Cuba? Just wondering. Do u know how people react when they see a car from State Security pull up next to them? I do.
And please consider the following: here we are 50 years nearly after the Cuban Revolution and you, not me, but you are trying hard to distinguish between Cuban jails and Gitmo. That you are even forced to engage the conversation tells us everything. Whether you or Randy is right (and he is) it hardly matters because even you are now conceding it’s a matter of degree only. And it is.
I was never a blind castrista — not by any stretch. But I remember very well in 1967 reading Che Guevara’s New Socialist Man and I was just young enough to buy it. Whatever the validity of that original vision, I assure you, my friend, it does not at all mesh with the realities of either Combine or Boniato prison which, sadly, derive much more closely from Solzenitzen.
In any case, every argument that has been used here to defend dictatorship in Cuba are precisely the same ones used by zealous American anti-communists and the Bush admin in defending their own abusive positions: that national security trumps civil liberties, that outside threats must be countered with internal repression, that summary application of the death penalty is applicable in certain cases of non-violence, that an unfettered press is a social liability, that people who hold subversive thoughts should be criminalized, that certain (thousands) of books should be banned (including works from Marxist theoreticians so long as they have been critical of Official History) that habeus corpus and an independent juidiciary (none of which exist in Cuba) are but quaint national suicide pacts, that voters and citizens arent to be trusted in freely electing their own governments as their stupdfity will let them be hoodwinked by foreign interests.
What a shameful,shameful, list of apologies for dictarorship. We wouldnt stand for 1/10th of that here in the US nor In Canada but some are ready to defend and celebrate it all day long –or all century long– in Cuba.
Leftside: I no sooner give you the names of my Cuban friends than I would give them to some unaccountable agent of Seguridad del Estado. In any case, State Security alreadys knows my friends, some of who worked in Minsitry of Interior Counter-intelligence and still couldnt stomach the regime in their old age. As they retired they found the notion of raising their grandchildren in Miami to be preferable to living in Havana. But what do they know? They only fought the counter-revolutionaries with machine guns in their hands.Poor misguided imperialist tools.
March 27th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
I find it absolutely astonishing that anyone would think that apologetics for Fidel and rationales for imprisoning admittedly non-insurrectionary political critics, no matter what their affiliations, are anything other than a detriment to establishing a credible critique of the existing U.S. policy toward Cuba. Frankly, these guy have essentially argued the government’s case for Smith Act and McCarthyite trials of CPUSA members back in the ’50s. Financial support and direct consultative links to Moscow were suspected than and have since been well established in Soviet archives. But only yahoos would argue that these prosecutions were justified. There’s a bizarre symbiosis at work here.
March 27th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Everything Marc, Randy and Reg says about Cuba is true but there is one slight problem that renders all our legitimate complaints less than useful. There is a principle in Equity law that says that the party asking for relief must come to the court with “Clean Hands” – i.e. its own actions must be circumspect and above board. Anyone here think the US Government (and I’m speaking of the last fifty years) qualifies? Between Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs, the Contras, and the other Sept 11 (Marc sure knows) our concerns for the wellbeing of those in Havana is taken by the people of the region with, shall we say, a certain scepticism.
And if one travels to little Havana one will find any number of Latin Achmed Chalibis all too eager for Uncle Sam to make them the Caudillo of the island. All in the name of Democracy of course.
Castro will pass. Things will change. But the best thing we can do is stand aside since our meddling is bound only to make things worse.
Sorry, wish it were otherwise but sometimes reality bites.
March 27th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
I just wonder which of these web names Mitt Romney is posting under.
March 27th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
“the best thing we can do is stand aside since our meddling is bound only to make things worse”
I absolutely agree with that as re: the U.S. government. But I think that when these issues are debated, the “clean hands” principle also applies – if only in some metaphorical sense – and that folks who aren’t seen as apologists for the Cuban government and endorse reasonably consistent standards of human rights throughout Latin America have far more credibility in arguing against U.S. interference than others.
March 27th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Alas Reg, maybe once. But I’m afraid we threw that away in 2004 when, in full possession of the facts, we voted to reelect Bush. I’m afraid that wasn’t voter fraud and the rest of the world sees us as enablers.
March 27th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
“we” voted to reelect Bush ? Woooahh! Who do I look like ? Ann “Persecuted By Blue Meanies So I’ll Scratch Out Your Eyeballs” Althouse ?
Okay, you’re making a meta-argument about global perceptions…I’m talking about actual debate among Americans of differing views ?
March 27th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
That last sentence wasn’t a question, despite the dubious punctuation.
March 27th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
We made an independent film in Cuba a couple of years ago. In fact we wrapped it just before Uncle Sam closed the door to educational tourism. Wherever we stuck a camera in Cuba was ok. On the street, In the jazz clubs (the jazz scene was the theme of the film) in the music high school and college in Havana. There are specialty schools,( free tuition up to advance degrees if you can hack it) for music, art, medicine, science etc etc. We filmed in museums, at a Buena Vista Social Club performance. Remember those wonderful old people? Still belting it out, some of them.
Even filmed during mass at a Catholic Church and at a primitive Afro-Cuban cultural ceremony. Cool people. Interesting culture. Very integrated and relaxed along color lines. We could learn.
Most living costs are on the government. If a family has someone in the tourist game they can be more comfortable and family in Cuba is numero uno. So people share. Imagine! Healthcare and literacy equal developed nation levels . The diet is better than it ever was thanks to a world class organic gardening movement that puts fresh veggies and fruits (grown right in the neighborhood) on everyone’s table.
One thing NOT on the table is criticism of the revolution. Of course, being descended from folks who did well by the misfortune of those on the wrong side of our sainted revolution( their Tories landed in Miami, ours in Canada, Bahamas etc etc.)we can understand how they can be touchy on the subject and overprotective. Comes with the territory. No es verdad?
China had a similar recent past. Does anybody know when they stopped being known as Red China? Maybe when they got so much of our money? There are good revolutionaries and the other kind. Maybe it’s the distance from our coastline that is key or maybe it’s the noise from the Tory settlements.
March 27th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Bob – I don’t think anyone is arguing that Cuba is locked down like Maoist China. It’s obvious that Cuban culture is very attractive and that the society is resilient in many ways. And the revolution has brought certain benefits in health indices and education that elude most of the rest of Latin America. I consider that interesting and undoubtedly useful information, but certainly not an argument for Fidel-style one-party politics. If anything, he’s been an impediment to successful democratic progressivism south of our border. I don’t think the experience of an independent filmmaker from the United States has much relevance to eliminating fundamental concerns about Cuba’s political or judicial system.
March 27th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Yes, I’ve been to Cuba, a few times.
I am under no illusions, but I also think its inappropriate to draw the conclusion from what I’m saying that I either support or condemn Cuba. Its complex. I’m quite literally on the fence about the issue, though I think the Cubafiles here are absolutely in the right in their facts. I also think its inappropriate to even mention Cuba’s no-doubt repressive system, and America’s international torture system in teh same sentene. Something about pikers…
Speaking of state security, just about every group that involved itself in the RNC protests of 2004 was spied on by Bloomberg’s finest.
March 27th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Cooper and Reg insist on calling out anyone who dares challenge their facts and assertions as “defending dictatorship†and equates such dissent as McCarthyism, yet can muster no energy to actually argue over said facts and ideas. Still we try.
The idea that only “yahoos†and fascists believe national security can trump the “freedom†of an individual is why the left is viewed with disdain by so many in the US. Of course the balance is very tricky and terribly important, but the case of direct aid and abetting subversion by an entity calling for regime chance is thankfully simple. It is conceded by every country in the world. I may have not sided with the US in all the Cold War disputes but I sure as hell would not see Soviet (or Iranian, or Cuban) funding, aid and organizing as legitimate protected expression.
Cooper goes on to rehash false notions we’ve already disputed the last go around, namely the death penalty against supposed non-violent perpetrators (ie. ferry hijackers), the Constitutional rights of habeas corpus and the independence of the Cuban justice system and that anyone has been arrested for thoughts. He then talks about thousands of banned books again, totally ignoring the first hand investigation by American librarians that was carried out with lists of banned books in hand I provided for all. Spurious claims like these roll off Cooper’s tongue, but providing proof is another matter. I would also love for him to explain how our most free-market oriented press (local TV and radio) is doing more of a service than state run NPR and PBS (long time family owned papers like the NY Times and protected conglomerates like CBS don’t are not as subject to free market principles).
As for Reg’s quip about Cuba being a failed economy, readers may want to check the record of economic growth in Cuba versus the rest of the region the last 10 years. Cuba is on par to crack 10% GDP growth again this year, jumping ahead of Venezuela as tops in the region (all without Soviet aid). Most Cubans have seen incomes and pensions doubled. And as far as Castro being a museum piece, I would suggest opening your eyes and noting that Cuba was voted overwhelmingly to head up the Non-Aligned Movement last year, that nearly every top African, Latin and Asian official openly expresses admiration for Castro’s inspiration, and that his ideas (if not the exact Cuban model) have soundly beaten neo-liberalism and the Washington consensus back to DC.
Meanwhile, our billion dollar buddy Egypt declares a permanent police state with 4% of people voting. Other best buds Colombia and Guatemala are on the brink of crisis because of State links to death squads and organized crime. Millions remain without access to water, sewage and health care in Latin America, while millions of middle class and rich people are trapped behind security systems. Into this noxious world, Cuba has given the gift of sight to 500,000 Latin Americans, the gift of reading to a million and become the first state to be certified as “sustainable†by the World Wildlife Fund. It is probably the first post-racial, post-criminal, post-AIDS, post-hunger, post-homeless society on earth as well. But I will stop “apologizingâ€â€¦
March 27th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
If I started a revolution 90 miles from US, I think I would be forced to protect it the same way Fidel has done. Our record is not great regarding governments we don’t approve of. Use your own list or I’ll be happy to supply one. All governments are oppressive when vital interests are at stake but few find it necessary or desirable to be so on a global scale and for half a century.
The Cubans are no longer in Angola but we are. And five hundred other places around the world.
March 27th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Good point Bob. Even leaders who meet all the official US thresholds of “freedom and liberal democracy” (ie. Hugo Chavez during the coup of 2002) are not safe from the tentacles of power US. Liberal pundits like to call Chavez and Castro paranoid, but if the US Government had a big “X” on you head, you might get the jitters as well.
March 27th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Reg we can argue all we want and I’ll probably agree with you on Cuba. But I doubt if our concerns for “Human Rights” carry much weight in other parts of the world. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not happy that polls indicate that much of the world – including Western Europe – think that we’re the greatest threat to world peace but that’s the way it is and it is going to take a very long time for us to overcome the damage to our good name perpetrated by the Bush Crime Family.
March 27th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Reg we can argue all we want and I’ll probably agree with you on Cuba. But I doubt if our concerns for “Human Rights” carry much weight in other parts of the world. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not happy that polls indicate that much of the world – including Western Europe – think that we’re the greatest threat to world peace but that’s the way it is and it is going to take a very long time for us to overcome the damage to our good name perpetrated by the Bush Crime Family.
March 27th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Reg we can argue all we want and I’ll probably agree with you on Cuba. But I doubt if our concerns for “Human Rights” carry much weight in other parts of the world. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not happy that polls indicate that much of the world – including Western Europe – think that we’re the greatest threat to world peace but that’s the way it is and it is going to take a very long time for us to overcome the damage to our good name perpetrated by the Bush Crime Family.
March 27th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Reg we can argue all we want and I’ll probably agree with you on Cuba. But I doubt if our concerns for “Human Rights” carry much weight in other parts of the world. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not happy that polls indicate that much of the world – including Western Europe – think that we’re the greatest threat to world peace but that’s the way it is and it is going to take a very long time for us to overcome the damage to our good name perpetrated by the Bush Crime Family.
March 27th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Reg we can argue all we want and I’ll probably agree with you on Cuba. But I doubt if our concerns for “Human Rights” carry much weight in other parts of the world. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not happy that polls indicate that much of the world – including Western Europe – think that we’re the greatest threat to world peace but that’s the way it is and it is going to take a very long time for us to overcome the damage to our good name perpetrated by the Bush Crime Family.
March 27th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
Renewed GDP growth – impressive the last few years after a period of disastrous decline – is based on vastly expanding tourism. The rest of the economy appears to be stagnant. This is the best “socialist development” can offer after 50 years ? And Cuba is no doubt just as dependent on remittances from the U.S. as the sorry example of Mexico to maintain living standards. I’m no expert on this, but I’ve seen figures ranging up to a billion a year – making it the largest single source of revenue after tourism. The sugar industry has declined, which may be a strategic decision. Although, given renewed interest in ethanol, that seems like a mistake. Cubans are being held hostage to bankrupt ideology. The more these guys rattle on, the less sense their arguments make.
March 27th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
“If I started a revolution 90 miles from US, I think I would be forced to protect it the same way Fidel has done.”
Which is why, if you started a revolution, I’ll be sure I don’t join up.
March 27th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
rlc gets 5 dupes and my rejoinder to “leftside” on the glories of the Cuban economy is stuck in “moderation”. Not fair. Just wanted leftside to know that he’s full of shit if he thinks his lame, recycled arguments can’t easily be punctured. But he’ll have to wait.
March 27th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Hey, what can I say? Something said well is worth repeating! Besides that’s what you get for throwing Peter’s Eptistles to me on the other place!
March 27th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
I had a feeling it was intentional…anyway, it looks like my “waiting moderation” has been switched off.
March 27th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
If only Serling had had the forsight to deal with some of this, when Peter Falk played Castro on “The Twilight Zone.”
March 27th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Reg, sorry to being my “lame” facts again but since 2004, tourism has actually been falling off in Cuba. I think it was off 7% from last year and 4% the year before, due to rising prices, warm winters and tightened US enforcement. So no, the highest levels of growth in 2005-06 was not due to tourist growth. It was due mostly to the increases in Nickel, export of medical and hi-tech services, as well as managed energy prices and conservation.
The halving of the sugar industry is an interesting issue for another day perhaps… inefficent plants were closed (while all workers received years of pay and retraining) when prices were at an all time low. They are now markedly higher. But I sense a deal with Brazil on the way to take advantage of the emerging ethanol market….
March 27th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
The Department of Defense has identified 3,233 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the deaths of the following Americans yesterday:
GONZALEZ, Orlando E., 21, Pfc., Army; New Freedom, Pa.; 82nd Airborne Division.
NUNEZ, Jason, 22, Cpl., Army; Naranjito, P.R.; 82nd Airborne Division.
SWIGER, Jason W., 24, Sgt., Army; South Portland, Me., 82nd Airborne Division.
WHITE, Anthony J., 21, Pfc., Army; Columbia, S.C.; 82nd Airborne Division.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Some relevant news from a reputable source:
Adriana Pérez and Olga Salanueva – both Cuban nationals – have been refused temporary visas which would allow them to visit their husbands in prison. Gerardo Hernández (husband of Adriana Pérez) and René Gonzáles (husband of Olga Salanueva) are serving long federal prison sentences in the USA, having been convicted in 2001 of acting as unregistered agents of the Cuban government.
AI believes that denying the women visas to visit their husbands is unnecessarily punitive and contrary to international standards for humane treatment of prisoners and states’ obligations to protect family life.
Between 2002 and 2005, the government denied the wives’ applications for temporary visas for various reasons relating to terrorism, espionage and issues of national security. Neither woman has faced charges in connection with such claims, nor have their husbands been charged with, or convicted of, terrorism. Both men are currently being held in the “general population†within their prisons, which suggests that the authorities do not consider them to represent a security risk.
Adriana Pérez has not been permitted to visit her husband since his arrest in 1998. Her most recent application for a temporary visa in October 2005 was denied on the grounds that she may seek to remain in the USA at the end of her authorized stay.
Olga Salanueva has not seen her husband since the eve of his trial in 2000. She lived legally in the USA for nearly two years during the trial proceedings but was deported when her husband refused to enter a plea arrangement in return for his family being allowed to remain in the USA. Her most recent application for a visa was denied on the grounds that she is ineligible to enter the USA for having previously been deported.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
That was a worldwide alert from Amnesty International…
March 27th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Amazing that leftside laments the treatment of alleged Cuban agents in the US but excuses the treatment of alleged American agents in Cuba.
March 27th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
(Balter) Umm, nice selective interpretation sir. My point is 180% – that the US of A treats much more dignified and justified “foreign agents” like dirt – denying family visits for BS reasons. These 5 were purely defensive in orientation… looking into the Alpha 66 and the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), who has been subsequently shown to have been buying helicopters, rocket launchers, boats and ak 47s to bring down Castro (but the FBI does nothing). Nothing in their file indicates offensive, anti-US or classified work. Contrast that to the Cubans on the island who were aiming to bring down their own government with the help of the most powerful Government in the world – playing into the US’ game plan.
March 28th, 2007 at 2:31 am
Tourism may be nudging down, but has it been driving economic growth since the “special period” or not ? Is it the dominant sector or not ? And for the foreseeable future ? Is there a “dual economy” based on access to dollars and euros from tourists ? And is the Cuban economy dependent on remittances from exiles ?
I find this whole discussion a game of special pleading and double standards. Is Cuban socialism a model for Latin American economic development ? That was supposed to be the deal, back when the ideological cards were dealt iin Cuba ? Looks like a meager, struggling command economy – with, of course, a growing sector of private employment – that has, throughout its entire history, limped along. Gross statistics are tricky, but their GDP per capita appears to be low even for the Carribean countries. My bet is that Marx would want his picture taken down. As for the accusation of “selective interpretation” against MB, he nailed this discussion by asking the key questions way, way back in this thread. Questions which haven’t been answered except with a lot of obfuscation and attempts to generalize that “everybody does it”. No everybody doesn’t.
March 28th, 2007 at 6:53 am
Leftside,
Growing up in Czechoslovakia we were regaled with wonderful economic growth numbers, which didn’t do us much good standing in line for hours to get oranges or bribing nurses to make sure our hospital bed sheets were changed, waiting ten years to get a telephone or a skoda auto.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:38 am
Shorter leftside: two wrongs do make a right.
March 28th, 2007 at 8:13 am
Randy – I have my reservations about the Cuban model, but can you honestly read “two wrongs make a right” between treatment of saboteurs by Cuba, and treatment of people investigting terrorism, by the United States. Again, the former were paid agents, as Leftside notes, of an enemy power trying to bring down the government. The latter were Cuba’s version of Richard Clarke or Michael Scheur.
March 28th, 2007 at 8:20 am
Balter: Amazing that leftside laments the treatment of alleged Cuban agents in the US but excuses the treatment of alleged American agents in Cuba.
—
What is so amazing? The Cuban agents were trying to identify terrorist plotters in Miami who had blown up civilian airliners in the past. The men who committed this act were never punished for these crimes. If the USA had simply ceased trying to overthrow the Cuban government back in the 1960s, there would be no need for Cuban agents to keep an eye on CIA-funded terrorists. Furthermore, the political space in Cuba would be a lot more open. This is elementary except for people like Balter and Cooper who are draped in the American flag.
March 28th, 2007 at 8:25 am
Jcummings,
If I accepted that those people were saboteurs, perhaps. I don’t accept that, however.
March 28th, 2007 at 8:43 am
Saboteur is a morally neutral term. You may agree with their acts of sabotage, but they were by any definition of the phrase, saboteurs, with the explicit, stated goal of regime change.
March 28th, 2007 at 8:46 am
With words and books, they are saboteurs.
Morally neutral my ass.
March 28th, 2007 at 8:56 am
Yes, with words and books they were saboteurs. They were in the pay of an enemy government and were using these words and books to help implement plans of regime change. I have made it clear that I disagree with their treatment.
The Cuban agents in the United States were investigating terrorism. I presume you don’t agree that they should be jailed?
Finally, saboteur is a morally neutral term. Partisans in Fascist occupied countries were saboteurs, for example.
March 28th, 2007 at 9:26 am
The Fidelistas continually remind us that the Cuban dissidents sought regime change, and they imply these agitators advocated violence. Not so. And isn’t that a pretty reasonable cutoff between free and dangerous speech? It’s a good enough rule for my society so isn’t it good enough for Cubans?
I know the rejoinder that Cuba faces an imposing enemy in the United States, but government restriction of peaceful speech is wrong and dictatorial. If the issue is the dirty American money, then how does one jibe that with all the remittances sent across the water? And are there any effective dissenters in Cuba who don’t take American money? If not, why not? Are all Cubans happy?
March 28th, 2007 at 9:30 am
It is really hard to believe the hypocrisy that comes out when Cuba is under discussion. The US Communist Party had close ties with Moscow–taking direct instructions much of its history–and still we recognize that McCarthyism was wrong because it punished thought and advocacy. There are revolutionary organizations in the United States today that advocate violent overthrow of the US government; their members are rarely thrown in jail and most of us here would not support that. Whether or not Cuban dissidents are supported by the US government or other organizations is not the issue, in fact it is a red herring designed to obfuscate the fact that there is not free speech nor freedom of the press in Cuba for ANYONE who would oppose the regime. Again, case closed.
March 28th, 2007 at 9:34 am
Yes, with words and books they were saboteurs.
God help us.
March 28th, 2007 at 9:53 am
“with words and books they were saboteurs”
If that’s the case, it’s incomprehensible to me why the mad dogs weren’t shot.
Where have you gone, Andrei Vishinsky? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:10 am
“With words and books they are saboteurs.”
Lord, that’s rich.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:40 am
MB cuts to the chase. It should also be noted that while travelers to Cuba will note that, yes, individuals express often sharp and biting criticism of the government in an informal context, organized expression of political opposition to the ruling party is forbidden. There are degrees of political oppression, and Cuba is obviously not insanely totalitarian in its social control like North Korea or China in 1966, but I find it absolutely amazing that anyone would try to rationalize a total suppression of independent political organization, the criminalizing of most entrepreneurial activity and the control of all media by the government.
If you don’t believe that actual people should have political rights, independent of what the state determines is good for them, just be up front about it. But don’t peddle repealing the essence of Enlightenment political philosopy in favor of Stalinist twaddle as a “revolution”. It’s utterly reactionary.
And if the Swedes can have universal health care and education without tossing people into prison, I’m confident that the Cuban people aren’t so inept and unsophisticated that they couldn’t manage the same. But the longer they cling to the notion of a command economy, the more likely that the whole thing will indeed come apart one day with some very negative fallout as regards social services – as it did in the Soviet Union. At this point, blaming it all on the embargo (which leaves the U.S. increasingly isolated in it’s anachronistic policy, more than the Cubans) or the Bay of Pigs or the conniving of the U.S. Interests Section in financing the activities of a handful of dissidents is a very unconvincing excuse for the obvious failure of Castro’s ideology. Look back at his claims when he came to power and put them in the context of contemporary Latin America. Fidel has been reduced to an increasingly absurd, backward-looking figure – a ghost.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:56 am
The enlightenment has already been repealed, see Auden, Adorno.
I’m not endorsing Cuba’s actions, I’m just placing them in the proper context, in comparison with US treatment of Cuban Anti-terrorist offiicals.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:58 am
a red herring…
Balter, I’m surprised you hear that funding by a government that is responsible for more violence over the last half century than every other country in the world, that in Latin America in particular has been horrifying, and continues to fund Ant-Castro terrorists out of Miami – is a red herring.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Finally, I answered Randy Paul’s question being flip…I don’t agree with the “independent librarian”/US agent’s treatment, but obviously they were involved with more than just books and words. Its amazing how putting things into proper historical context gets one labelled as endorsing the fact that one is describing.
March 28th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Here’s why it’s a red herring, jcummings: You don’t pick and choose who you give free speech to in a democracy. You give it to everyone. You can disapprove if you don’t like what they say or who is paying for them to say it, but you don’t prohibit it. I thought that was basic, but minds go numb when Cuba is involved.
March 28th, 2007 at 11:29 am
Balter: “It is really hard to believe the hypocrisy that comes out when Cuba is under discussion. The US Communist Party had close ties with Moscow–taking direct instructions much of its history–and still we recognize that McCarthyism was wrong because it punished thought and advocacy.”
I assume this is directed to me. But it still an evasion. I did not say that is a good thing that people are arrested in Cuba, only that this is a function of 47 years of invasion, economic blockade. illegal overflights and broadcasting, terrorist bombings of hotels and airplanes, burning of crops, very likely chemical and biological warfare from a country that is nearly 30 times larger and with a GDP that is 500 times as large. Any other country that was putting up with such menacing and nonstop aggression would act in a much more Draconian fashion. Balter and Cooper, however, are not interested in this history. They walk around with an American flag stuck up their ass while Lincoln and FDR suspended constitutional liberties in the face of a much less serious threat.
March 28th, 2007 at 11:37 am
It is strange that with all this aggression against Cuba from the USA, which I agree has happened and is reprehensible, the suppression of dissent is internal and is directed at Cubans themselves–all Cubans. How does that counter US aggression, unless every Cuban is considered part of a Fifth Column. But I am glad to see John Smith admit that he believes constitutional rights should be suspended in times of war, he should get a job with the Bush Justice Department which thinks the same way.
March 28th, 2007 at 11:53 am
btw my comments were not directed specifically at Smith but at everyone who excuses repression in Cuba. We don’t know what Cubans would do if they were free to do and say what they want, because the experiment has never been carried out.
March 28th, 2007 at 11:54 am
Marc, I think you’re basically right here, but this is a lapse of logic:
>I also wonder if Leftside believes that >Americans who went on the Venceremos >Brigade and therefore were 100% >subsidized by the Cuban government should >be put in jail as foreign enemy agents once >they arrive back the U.S.
This is not the same thing as taking funds for domestic political activities from a hostile foreign power. If Leftside took funds from, say, Al Qaeda, to work to overthrow the US government, he’d quickly be in a Cuban prison too.
March 28th, 2007 at 11:54 am
Balter: “It is strange that with all this aggression against Cuba from the USA, which I agree has happened and is reprehensible, the suppression of dissent is internal and is directed at Cubans themselves–all Cubans.”
Balter, you really don’t seem to know very much about world politics, do you? The CIA has made use of Fifth Columns for the better part of 50 years: Chile, Iran, Nicaragua, Angola, Guatemala, Venezuela, the Philippines, Congo, and a host of other countries. If you want to learn more about this, I recommend William Blum or Noam Chomsky.
March 28th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
“Balter, you really don’t seem to know very much about world politics, do you?”
Oh, wow, what I am dealing with here, another 22 year old? I was organizing against the war in Vietnam when Chomsky was still developing his linguistic theories and hadn’t become the political guru he is today. So suppression of free speech in all of these countries would be justified because the CIA is operating in them? That’s the logic of those who excuse Cuban repression. It is not aimed at CIA Fifth Columns, it is aimed at suppressing dissent among all Cubans. Dissent are free expression are basic human rights, but Stalinists don’t recognize them.
March 28th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
“FDR suspended constitutional liberties in the face of a much less serious threat.”
The childishness of these morons is too evident in their lecturing on what everyone already knows – as if it’s some “secret history” of imperialism – while ignoring the obvious issue of whether or not Cuba is country that has anything that could be construed with honesty as freedom of the press or freedom for organized political opposition to the ruling party, be it pro-US, social-democratic, Trotskyist, or whatever. What John Smith does with that particular quote is essentially align himself with Michelle Malkin in somehow attempting to “normalize” what was one of the more sordid and indefensible violations of the U.S. Constitution and basic human rights in American history. Also, while I think that Lincoln’s record on this is something that should be subjected to more scrutiny and criticism than it tends to get because of his sanctified status in the pantheon of American Presidents – which is as much a function of his superior rhetorical skills and complex personality as it is of his admitted greatness as a national leader – the notion that the civil war was a “less serious threat” than the Bay of Pigs invasion and subsequent CIA maneuvering is bizarre. Lincoln could hear the shots from battle in the White House and the Union was at times closer to losing the war than the Bay of Pigs or any of the rest of it was to ever succeeding.
The greatest threat to the survival of the Cuban people in the last fifty years was posed by Castro himself, when he attempted to convince Khruschev not to cut a deal with Kennedy in negotiating an end to the missile crisis. The US and USSR both played a dangerous game in those two weeks, but the worst of the players were Castro and Guevara, who as I said earlier, stood fast with our own home-grown fascistic refugee from Dr. Strangelove, General Curtis Lemay, in the notion that it was worth pushing the world over the brink into nuclear war in defense of near-psychotic ideologically-driven “heroics”.
March 28th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Balter: “Oh, wow, what I am dealing with here, another 22 year old? I was organizing against the war in Vietnam when Chomsky was still developing his linguistic theories and hadn’t become the political guru he is today.”
Actually I am 62 and had much more to do with the antiwar movement than you ever did. Trust me on that.
“So suppression of free speech in all of these countries would be justified because the CIA is operating in them?”
No, suppress people who take money from the NED is more like it. You are some kind of mistaken impression that you are still the radical that you were in 1968 (if you ever were one.) But you have evolved into an ACLU liberal without noticing it. How pathetic.
March 28th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Thanks reg, good points, and that’s it for me today. At least we have the consolation that the John Smiths of this world have made themselves irrelevant in the real world despite their overheated rhetoric. As for ACLU liberals, we could use a few of them in Cuba. Funny thing, but somehow the Cuban government sees fit to suppress the free speech of the average person in the street, not just those who take money from the NED. But you can’t be too careful when you are following the true path, can you?
March 28th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Balter: “Funny thing, but somehow the Cuban government sees fit to suppress the free speech of the average person in the street, not just those who take money from the NED.”
Balter, how do know exactly what limits there are to political expression in Cuba? Are there political prisoners except for the 27 people who were jailed for lining their pockets with NED cash? Can you name some writers or intellectuals who were jailed for opposing the system?
Columbia University awarded Francisco Varela an honorary doctorate for denouncing the system there. Is he in jail now?
Mostly you seem content to mouth the sort of superficialities you can hear on CNN. Maybe you should go to a library and read something scholarly. I recommend Carollee Bengeldorf’s “The Problem of Democracy in Cuba”, although in doing so I feel rather like recommending a chess opening to a chimpanzee.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Reg.. u keep bringing up an excellent point that goes unremarked. i.e. what we know no from Fidel’s own hand that during Cuban missile crisis he was ready to launch a nuclear attack from Cuba.
Also as to Guevara: I strongly suggest reading Jorge Castaneda’s biography of Che. The only one that understand the man, and with a certain amount of sympathy and pity, lays bare his political confusion, naivete and, yes, darkness.
As to John Smith: You gave away the game, pal. By accusing someone of being a mere ACLU liberal instead of an olf 68 radical, and thinking that is a barb, tells us just about everything we need to know about YOU. I dunno if Balter’s gonna be able to live with that dastardly charge.
But I sure would, thanks. I’ll take a roomful of folks who universally defend rule of law over a gaggle of militant revolutionaries anytime, anywhere. It’s a whole lot safer.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
I’ve already mentioned upstream how the actions of Bush and the rest of his criminal band have made US words of disapproval of Cuban actions ring hollow in the rest of the world but when I hear about the question of who is or is not a “Saboteur” I’m reminded of the great Mort Sahl’s comments in the fifties that every time the Soviets throws an American in prison we retaliate – by throwing an American in prison!
March 28th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
I’ll answer: There are hundreds of political prisoners in Cuba — maybe 4-600 depending on how u cut the cake.
Can In name writers who have been jailed> Have u heard or Herberto Padllia? How about Norberto Fuentes? What’s the story with Reynaldo Arenas, Raul Rivero?
Why has Vladiimr Roca been in and out ouf jail (his father was founder of the CP).
The list is endless, Smith. Please name the newspapers, radio stations, web sites, magazines that are open to pieces calling for democratic elections? Or suggesting that Fidel/Raul should resign.
Could u show the equivalent of the Bill of Rights in the Cuban constitution (good luck).
I personally know one prominent prize winning novelist who was “disappeared” from public life for 15 years. I now three reporters who left the country after being threatened with jail– all 3 were Marxists by the way. Anyway, what a monumental waste of time to be arguing with you. My current fever must be very high.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
62 ? Still crazy after all these years.
MB – you’re being a bit unfair to Chomsky, who was an early “intellectual against the war” via pieces in mags like Liberation and, more prominently, The New York Review of Books. (Of course he didn’t have as much to do with the antiwar movement as John Smith. Gotta love dueling ’60s creds.)
Smith – the most salient question isn’t whether artists and random intellectuals are routinely imprisoned, but whether organized political opposition to the ruling party is tolerated. If it isn’t (which is the fact), this stupid debate is over. The notion that there are no such thing as political prisoners in Cuba shows you to be remarkably out of touch with reality. Also regarding artists, among others, have you ever heard of the poet Heberto Padilla ?
From Padilla’s obituary in the UK Guardian:
In 1968…the judges in (Cuba’s) national poetry contest decided to award their annual prize to Padilla’s collection, Fuera del Juego (Out of the Game), which contained such obvious revolutionary scepticism as the following lines: “The poet! Kick him out!/ He has no business here./ He doesn’t play the game./ He never gets excited/ Or speaks out clearly./ He never even sees the miracles …”
The award caused a furore on the island. Although the book was published, an appendix was added criticising it as a “counter-revolutionary” work. Padilla was placed under house arrest. In 1971, as the political climate in Cuba worsened still further, he was interrogated for a month by the security police. But it was when he was forced to appear before the writers’ union, make a public confession of his “crimes” and accuse other writers – including his wife, Belkis Cuza Malé – of harbouring similar “counter- revolutionary” ideas that his predicament became an international scandal. (end clip)
As I said earlier, not comparable to China circa ’66 or North Korea, but a despicable legacy for so-called “revolutionaries”.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Cooper: “But I sure would, thanks. I’ll take a roomful of folks who universally defend rule of law over a gaggle of militant revolutionaries anytime, anywhere. It’s a whole lot safer.”
Especially if this means defending your standard of living in capitalist America by writing articles that don’t challenge the economic system.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
OK, Marc, you beat me to it on Padilla…and the more I think about it, Padilla’s case IS precisely reminiscent of the “confessions” elicited from artists and intellectuals during the “Cultural Revolution.”
March 28th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Cooper, can’t you come up with something more recent than Padilla? He was arrested FORTY YEARS AGO. Furthermore, Abel Prieto, the head of the Cuban writer’s union, had this to say on the case FOURTEEN YEARS AGO:
Q: Would the Padilla case be treated differently today?
A: I am sure it would be. I am convinced that the Padilla case was an error. Of course, it’s easy today, in 1993, to stop and criticize errors. I even believe that his book Fuera de juego [Out of play] might have simply faded away. But we made it into something with the famous imprisonment of Heberto Padilla for several hours-I don’t know how long, but it was very short.
—
Of course, I don’t expect any of this to matter to you since your views are obviously shaped by the Cuban counter-revolutionaries in Miami rather than an objective analysis of the facts.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Listen, Mr. Smith, arguing with you gives me the same sort of creeps as arguing with a soul-less defender of Gitmo.
Padllia’s best friend, and you can look up who that is easily enough, is my best friend who still lives in Cuba so I know more than u can imagine.
Abel Prieto is also a liar, implying that the Padilla affair was an edpisode of a couple of hours. In fact it was a landmark cultural catastophe in Cuba, once and forever shutting down any lasting remnant of free expression. It was also the onset of an anti-gay campaign that lasted several years, not several minutes, that saw “maricones” imprisoned in UMAP work camps,
I have been a guest lecturer at the Cuban Union of Journalists, at the University of Havana Journalism School, in the offices of JUventud Rebelde, and also at the Cuban National Writers Union. All of my two-to-three dozen cuban friends are writers and journalists. All are on the left. All were “revolutionaries.” None of them is in the pay of the U.S. Since I first befriended them in the 1980′s ALL OF THEM HAVE LEFT CUBA simply because they got tired of being able to write only propaganda. The only two I have left in Cuba is Padilla’s old pal who is sufficiently close to Fidel and old enough that he is ok. The other is a well known Uruguayan exile who has made it big in spanish literature and is free to travel on his foreign passport.
Otherwise, the world of Cuban ideas and debate is as dead as a cemetery. Now Im off to take a hot shower. I hate debating with those who despise and devalue freedom.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Reg: Padilla’s case IS precisely reminiscent of the “confessions†elicited from artists and intellectuals during the “Cultural Revolution.â€
—
That’s right. And if the Red Guards were still running around beating people up for promoting bourgeois values, it would be relevant to mention this. As it turns out, the Chinese reward and promote people today for exactly those values. Referring to events in Cuba in 1968 is a little bit like somebody describing the USA as in the grips of a witch-hunt by mentioning the Rosenbergs. Yeah, that happened but it doesn’t any more for the most part. You characters would obviously understand that things have changed in the USA but can’t grasp that things change in Cuba as well. You might as well complain about people like Arenas being persecuted for being gay. Oh, jeez, that wouldn’t work since gay marriage is now the big thing in Cuba.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
The Cubans Writers Unions (UNEAC) and the Government have expressed regret many numerous times in various arenas for the period of the late 60s, early 70s when cultural freedoms did indeed take a beating. Here is the latest iteration (a couple weeks ago), reported in the bastion of Commieville, the Miami Herald:
One by one, Cuban artists and intellectuals in Havana did something unprecedented this week: They stood before the government and criticized a particularly harsh era of censorship — out loud and in the open.
Perhaps even more surprising than the conference held Tuesday to discuss a dark period of Cuban cultural oppression was what happened outside: a protest by those shut out of the invitation-only event. Also out loud and in the open.
…
In a move that Cuba experts say signals a significant shift in Cuban domestic policy, the government led by interim President Raúl Castro appears to be cracking open the door to debate. After Castro publicly asserted he was open to discussion (urging students to “debate fearlessly”), and later convened a committee to study flaws of socialism, experts say there has been a clear changing of the guard in Cuba, one that allows at least controlled discussion.
In the first sign of internal dissent since Fidel Castro ceded power six months ago, intellectuals furious over the television appearances of 1970s-era government officials responsible for a crackdown on intelligentsia convened a conference to discuss it.
The artists union drafted a statement opposing the Government’s move, which was printed in several Cuban newspapers. The Government was forced to back down…
March 28th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Cooper: ALL OF THEM HAVE LEFT CUBA simply because they got tired of being able to write only propaganda.
—
Well, I see that you are shifting the terms of the debate. I can’t blame you because the evidence of people being jailed today other than for feeding at the trough of the NED is nonexistent.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Is that the same Abel Prieto who made the government’s case for jailing Raul Rivero ? Also, Prieto’s facts are wrong. Padilla wasn’t simply “jailed for a few hours”. He’s got Padilla confused with Johnny Cash.
March 28th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Smith – could you at least get the date right. It was ’71, not ’68. And if you think there’s no official censorship in Cuba today, including stuff like subjecting Hip Hop lyrics to scrutiny before they’re allowed on to be performed at festivals, you’re not paying attention. There’s a flourishing blackmarket in music and such these days in Cuba, which is evidence of what a loser’s game official censorship is in today’s world, but the Cuban government still has a heavy hand in determining whether controversial music is broadcast, what books are published and what films are shown. To rationalize this kind of crap is to put yourself beyond the pale in the minds of most of us. Do things change ? Yes. Presumably in the wake of marxism-leninisms near-total collapse globally, Fidel can’t keep up the same front as in 1968. But just because there’s no HUAC operating in the U.S. circa 2007 doesn’t mean I’ll turn a blind eye to the Patriot Act and satisfy myself that these aren’t “the bad old days” so not to worry. It’s odd how you guys seem to suggest that the worst violations of the Bill of Rights in this country are the kinds of inevitable over-reach by government that we should just accept in a nasty world, and so Cuba’s institutionalizing such outrages isn’t a big deal.
March 28th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Gee in ’68 I was “Clean for Gene” and in ’71 I was in DC at that big anti-war rally where John Kerry spoke to the Senate.
(Don’t know why that makes me more trustworthy but since everyone here is touting their anti-Imperialist Credentials I just thought I’d put my two cents in)
(Then again I was in the Army and working at NSA so I guess I’m just another oppressor – forget everything I said!)
March 28th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
John Smith,
How about some examples of dissenters living and operating freely in Cuba? Who is peacefully advocating for more than one-party rule and isn’t getting locked up? Throw us some names and web adresses so we can judge for ourselves. Isn’t that a fair request?
March 28th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Cooper offers up a figure of 4-600 “political prisoners” in Cuba, which is interesting considering it is well above what even the US State Department, exile and Cuban (“independent”) human rights groups and Amnesty International have documented. First off “political prisoner” describes something totally different. AI does not report any of those in Cuba, but does cite a a total of 67 “prisoners of conscience,” which basically incldues the rest of the 75 still in jail after the 2003 crackdown on US paid agents we’ve been referring to. US, Cuban and exile groups have given a max of around 2-300 lately.
Reg says: the most salient question isn’t whether artists and random intellectuals are routinely imprisoned, but whether organized political opposition to the ruling party is tolerated. If it isn’t (which is the fact), this stupid debate is over.
Here are just some examples of the way organized political opposition is handled in Cuba today (all from Amnesty International):
The Ladies in White (Las Damas de Blanco), a group of (these same 67) prisoners’ female relatives, have marched every Sunday since March 2003 demanding the release of their husbands, brothers and sons. They march through central Havana neighborhoods and other towns. Their first and only “trouble” occured last week, upon the 4 year anniversary of the arrests, where hundreds of upset (mostly) Cuban women followed the damas part of the way, yelling things like “viva Fidel” alongside.
In May 2005, the Assembly to Promote Civil Society — a coalition of more than 350 independent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (each having 1-2 members) — held an unprecedented meeting of dissidents in Cuba (the meeting was allowed to take place without incident).
In 2002, the “Todos Unidos†(“All Togetherâ€) movement sponsored the Proyecto Varela petition for a referendum on fundamental freedoms. Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas of the Movimiento Cristiano Liberación, and other Proyecto Varela leaders presented more than 11,000 signatures (it took 3-4 years to collect that many) to the National Assembly demanding a referendum on fundamental freedoms. Shortly afterwards, former US President Carter arrived in Cuba and, in an unprecedented move, was allowed to address the nation in a live broadcast. He supported the Proyecto Varela petition and discussed a range of human rights matters.
On 12 June, the authorities organized a massive march in support of a new referendum initiative which would maintain the existing system. On 20 June, a petition signed by a reported 99 per cent of Cuban voters was submitted to the National Assembly calling for reaffirmed commitment to socialism. Six days later, the National Assembly voted unanimously in favour of a Constitutional amendment declaring the socialist system irrevocable…
There are numerous anti-Revolutionary organizations and politcal parties “unofficially tolerated” in Cuba. Also, the most prominent (and credible) dissidents in Cuba were left untouched during the round up and are mostly tolerated… Paya, Roca, Elizardo Sanchez…
I am not saying life is easy for those that choose to vocally oppose the regime from the outside – and do it for a living. But staying away from the US or Miami groups and within Cuban Law seems to assure one of a certain measure of protection (unless I can be shown otherwise). Still they have no followers and are totally ideologically divided.
We’ve discussed Padilla. Fuentes was never repressed, he simply decided to leave the country, after a falling out. Since then, he has remained remarkably reverent of the Revoution and Fidel (and vice versa… the reason he’s not trusted in Miami). Despite the extensive liberties taken in the Arenas film, the ending of that story is the one that really matters (lonely, broke, failure, dead of AIDS in a NYC squat). He was a tragic case… Rivero is held up as some intellecutal poet, when his stuff is absolute rubbish. I notice Western newspapers don’t seem to find his writing as interesting now that he is living in Spain.
March 28th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
I think Smith’s most salient point is that Marc apparently makes a decent living 35-years into his career as a journalist. Apparently this implies some causal impact on his advocacy, which seems to be some sort of left-reformist deal involving national health insurance, more effective unions, throwing bums out of DC who are inattentive to the conerns of working people or overly generous to corporations and constantly – even mean-spiritedly, some might say – tweaking of the Democrats for falling far short of his admittedly tattered ideals. This is a considerable right-turn from his more youthful incarnation as some sort of self-styled marxist revolutionary who dreamed of imperialism’s collapse and, more than likely, just scraped by in his personal finances. Frankly, I find that transiton shocking and offensive on Cooper’s part. How dare he !
March 28th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Hey, if Fidel’s screening Rap lyrics he’s got my vote!
March 28th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
That line about rap music from Reg almost got by me. It is apparently true that Cuban rappers have to show some level of Cuban Government officials their lyrics before playing at the Annual state sponsored Hip-Hop Festival (based on the movie East of Havana). But, after having just watched something on CNN about Republicans blocking the planned Al Gore Global Warming concert on the Capital, I am reminded these things are natural everywhere. When a government (or government funded entity) puts anything on, every detail must be looked, including the content of those on stage. This may offend the sensibilities of some here, and I don’t love it either. But its a fact.
Does that mean there was any evidence of repression against Cuba’s rappers political content? It does not appear so – those in the film are played on Cuban radio, make and sell CDs – and travel abroad. Rappers were given an entire studio to make their music by the Government and they are supported in other ways besides the Festival. The rappers in the film were very explicit in their criticisms and sympathy with the Revolution. Their voice is authentic. They choose to not be a part of the Cuban Rap Agency, which helps artists get marketed around the island and abroad. They seem as free as any underground hip-hop group in Los Angeles to get heard…. probably more so. They are not censored. Their political sophistication could teach our rappers a thing or two….
March 28th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
I’m still waiting for the names of dissenters living and operating freely in Cuba.
March 28th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Bob, i just gave you the top 3 + a group of thirty-some weekly marchers (las damas) – with links. Or are my 2 posts still waiting moderation?? There are plenty more lesser known ones, but those I noted are well known”tolerated” dissidents. The Cuba blogosphere and web debate sites are really starting to explode as well… very interesting stuff.
March 28th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
If Republicans block Gore’s concert on Capital Hill, he can hold it any time, anywhere. Such freedom simply does not exist in Cuba. To see it does is a lie.
March 28th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
I haven’t read all the other comments – but to Balter on free speech. … I agree…I’m in no way justifying suppression of free speech. Merely contextualizing an issue is not endorsing the treatment of these folks. I’m not a fan of the Cuban model. I’m also not a fan of reading an endorsement of said model into any contextualization.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
“I’m still waiting for the names of dissenters living and operating freely in Cuba.”
John Smith and leftside want us to think that there aren’t many political prisoners in Cuba, and then they want us to think that is proof that there is free expression on the island. You don’t have to put everyone in jail for the majority to get the message, and in Cuba the message has been loud and clear. Castro once said, within the revolution everything, outside the revolution nothing. The only problem is that Castro and a few handpicked comrades decide what is within the revolution and that is that.
March 29th, 2007 at 7:15 am
Balter, the last time that somebody was jailed for their ideas in Cuba was approximately 40 years ago. I challenged you to produce the names of political prisoners in Cuba today, others than ones who were getting funded by the USA. You could not. You really should shut your ignorant trap until you get your facts straight.
March 29th, 2007 at 8:30 am
Cuba can’t really have a free-swinging democracy if Washington is intervening actively with money and its continued military occupation of Guantanamo.
The United States government has budgeted $80 million dollars to organize the overthrow of the Cuban government and the social system which it defends, the one which provides free health care and education for everyone. Don’t take my word for the amount, look at the website of the U.S. government: http://www.cafc.gov
Cuba is the only country on the planet where a military base and now a torture prison for people held indefinitely without charge or trial continues to occupy a part of the country’s territory. This is done by the United States government, whose public legislation commits it to the overthrow of the Cuban system and the restoration of capitalism. Through the laws such as Helms-Burton and Torricelli, and the Cuban Adjustment Act, Washington works ACTIVELY to overthrow the Cuban system.
Cuba: has it ever tried to overthrow the United States government? Never! They sent a few agents to infiltrate right-wing Cuban exile organizations, one which organized terrorist activities against Cuba, but that’s about it.
In this context, Cuba and the United States are not and cannot be equal. Cuba’s government certainly does limit democratic rights. But in a situation like David and Goliath, Cuba does what it feels it must to defend itself. Look at Iraq today and you can see what Cuba would look like if it were “liberated†by Washington.
In Guantanamo, the world can see what legal system Washington would impose on the rest of Cuba if only it could. In Guantanamo, which is United States occupied territory, prisoners are held without trial for years, and are told they could be held indefinitely even if not found guilty there. It’s true that “two wrongs don’t make one rightâ€, but in this context, Cuba’s defensive measures should come as no surprise to anyone.
March 29th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Perhaps John Smith and the rest could explain the case of Martha Beatriz Roque, the economist who was fired from her post and jailed in recent years, and whose case, among others, spurred Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist and member of the Communist Party, to express his extreme disillusionment with Cuba. The notion that no one has been jailed for simple political opposition in Cuba in nearly forty years is completely nuts. Really. And that dissidents come back out of prison doesn’t change the fact that their treatment freezes Cuban political discourse. That’s the whole point. If these guys main point is to make a credible case against U.S. policy toward Cuba, they’re doing an extremely lousy job. They just reinforce a stereotype of leftist loonies who are peddling crap.
March 29th, 2007 at 8:50 am
“Look at Iraq today and you can see what Cuba would look like if it were ‘liberated’ by Washington.”
That’s a crackpot analogy. Pat Costello may be the most shallow hack lefty retread to show up yet. Reminds me of Karen Wald.
March 29th, 2007 at 9:08 am
This article appeared today in Progreso Weekly and is very relevant:
PROGRESO WEEKLY
March 20, 2007
http://www.progresoweekly.com/
Comparing Padillas, homosexuality and murder
By Saul Landau
Bush behavior – practicing torture, violating human rights and
wrapping itself in secrecy while preaching the opposite – has given
deceit a bad name. W didn’t begin the double speak and double
standards patter, however.
In 1971, U.S. troops and bombers routinely massacred Vietnamese,
Laotians and Cambodians. In that same year, Cuban police arrested a
poet, Heberto Padilla, without charging him. Hundreds of U.S. and
European intellectuals and academics who had opposed against the U.S.
wars reserved a special kind of outrage when unsubstantiated rumors
spread that Padilla had undergone brutal torture. Petitions
circulated demanding that Cuba stop torturing this great poet,
although no one had seen or heard any direct evidence of such
mistreatment.
After 38 days, Cuba’s state security cops sprung Padilla, who then
delivered his notorious speech (1930s Stalin purge style imitation
confession) to writers and artists, condemning his “bourgeois” and
“counterrevolutionary behavior”, and naming other writers as also
responsible for their misguided comportment. It didn’t matter whether
he invented the speech as a kind of literary ruse to mock state
security or the cops had pressured him to deliver this mea culpa.
Padilla became an instant pariah – a fink and coward — in Cuban
intellectual circles.
His book of poems, Fuera del Juego (Out of the Game), won the UNEAC
(Artists and Writers Union) poetry prize in 1968. Cuba published the
book with a foreword by UNEAC reprimanding Padilla for his behavior.
Over the ensuing months and years after his arrest, I talked with
Padilla who laughed at the campaign to stop his supposed torture.
He had suffered a severe nervous reaction to getting arrested, he
recounted The cops panicked over his stomach pains and they rushed
him to a seaside resort, fed him yogurt and provided on-call doctors.
Throughout the 1970s, Cuban intellectuals would cross the street when
they saw Padilla. A few felt sorry for him and his
reputation-blanching mistake: making the mea culpa statement. Padilla
admitted to me that the security people had behaved considerately.
But we agreed they had no right to arrest him – just because he had
written and spoken dissenting words in brilliant poems and bad
mouthed Fidel and the revolution to foreign visitors. His arrest
correctly provoked leading world intellectuals to respond in outrage.
Cuba deserved condemnation for having arrested Padilla, but not for
torturing him since he wasn’t tortured or threatened with torture.
Padilla lived quietly in Havana for several years afterwards,
receiving a good salary from the state. In 1980, he moved to the
United States where he taught at Princeton and then at Auburn
University. He died of a heart attack in 2000, a lonely man.
Another Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Jose of Puerto Rican descent, holds
no claim to the intellectual spotlight. Intellectuals have not
rallied to the cause of this former street gang member who converted
to Islam. In February, in a Miami courtroom, the world public learned
- those few who read about it – that after September 11 U.S.
interrogators used “unusual” methods to “break” prisoners.
Unlike Cuban state security who fed Heberto yogurt, the U.S.
torturers offered Jose sleep interruption, sound blasting and mind
altering drugs. They broke Padilla, but not exactly in the way they
wanted. The Bushies had planned to try him as an international
terrorist, but his lawyers argued that the long years of torture
while in captivity had left him insane and therefore not fit to stand
trial. The judge disagreed, but the gruesome details are starting to
emerge.
In May 2002 U.S. agents grabbed Padilla at Chicago’s O’Hare airport,
classified him “enemy combatant,” and threw him into a tiny,
windowless cell in a Navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. They
shackled Padilla, covered his eyes with goggles and his ears with
headphones — for more than 3 years. His interrogators forbade him
contact with lawyers or family members, but they did keep bright
lights turned on him and blasted his auditory nerves with loud
sounds. Padilla claims they injected him “truth serum,” or, perhaps
as his lawyers believe LSD or PCP.
Two professionals examined him and determined he had been physically
destroyed, and thus unable to assist in his own defense. He thinks of
his lawyers as interrogators, not as defenders. As Naomi Klein wrote
(The Nation, March 12, 2007), in order to prove that “the extended
torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged,” his lawyers
want to tell the court what happened during those years in the Navy
brig. The government strenuously objects, maintaining that “Padilla
is competent,” that the treatment he received is irrelevant.
Compare the intellectual outrage in Heberto Padilla’s case with the
relatively muted response by leading intellectuals and artists to
Jose Padilla’s treatment. The outcry of human rights violations
around the Cuban poet was literally deafening; the silence on Jose
Padilla rings louder still. His case drags on as torture claims from
U.S. prisons multiply.
In 1971, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag, led a
list of distinguished writers. They held Fidel Castro responsible for
directing Heberto’s torture. Do intellectuals not get aroused by what
appears as yet one more George W. Bush peccadillo? Is it because most
cultured people no longer hold the assumption that the United States
holds the eternal torch for human rights and civilized behavior?
Indeed, when U.S. officials use moral hyperbole it seems to mocks the
facts of U.S. behavior. In early March, Marine Gen. Peter Pace,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly likened homosexuality
to adultery. The General vibrated his moral outrage over the prospect
of having gay soldiers serving alongside straight soldiers. Yich!!!
The military, he declared, “should not condone it by allowing gays to
serve openly in the armed forces.” In 1994, President Clinton
instituted his enigmatic “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on sexuality
- which he ironically did not use himself when he got caught in the
Monica Lewinsky scandal. Pace, the law abiding officer, claimed he of
course supported this standard, which prohibits commanders from
asking about a person’s sexual orientation.
But, Pace personally believed that “homosexual acts between two
individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.”
Pace told a reporter: “I do not believe the United States is well
served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.”
Speaking “as an individual, I would not want (acceptance of gay
behavior) to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our
policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with
somebody else’s wife, that we would just look the other way, which we
do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior,” he said.
(Pauline Jelinek, AP, March 13, 2007
Wow, I said to myself, it’s a good thing the reporter didn’t ask Pace
how he compared his moral standards on homosexual behavior with the
morality of killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians – or
indeed, if such killing by the U.S. heterosexual military was
immoral. Imagine an army that took seriously the Sixth Commandment -
You Shall Not Murder!
Given the raging fundamentalism that is sweeping across the United
States and the armed forces, it becomes puzzling to see this
Commandment become an exception. When it comes to the unborn
(abortion) or brain dead — remember Terri Schiavo? — the
fundamentalists reach their pinnacle of moral indignation.
Somewhere in their Bible it must say something about how angry God
gets when He sees two guys getting it on. This obviously means more
to Him than the act of slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent
people in Iraq, which was the U.S. army’s job. Is there no
Commandment that says: “Thou shalt not bugger the neighbor”? There’s
one about not “coveting your neighbor’s wife, or male or female
slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
But when U.S. soldiers stole from and raped Iraqis wholesale after
they invaded in March 2003, Pace expressed no moral indignation.
In the 1970s, Cuba mistakenly arrested Heberto Padilla, an act that
symbolized the restriction of creativity. Subsequently, the
government reversed those policies. In the last two decades, Cuban
music, literature and especially cinema has offered profound
critiques of its social order. Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s “Strawberry and
Chocolate” and “Guantanamera” ridicule Party line thinking and
bureaucracy.
Bush and company have not taken responsibility for the injustice done
to Jose Padilla and thousands more held without charges, many of them
tortured. “Mistakes were made!” Bush chants this mantra when his
murderous errors in Iraq are revealed.
The Heberto Padilla case still resonates with the notion of
censorship, but it no longer represents Cuba cultural policy. The
Jose Padilla case stands as the insignia of current U.S. justice
standards.
March 29th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Reg, the idiot who can’t get a decent night’s sleep unless he posts 25 times here, asked about Martha Beatriz Roque. She was arrested for taking money from the United States, just like the others. I guess that the ACLU liberals who run with Cooper will defend to their death the right of the CIA, the NED and the State Department to spend tens of millions of dollars to overthrow the governments not to their liking.
March 29th, 2007 at 10:33 am
I may broadly agree with you, John Smith, but why the perjoratives about the ACLU? Do you believe that the US state has the right to trample on civil liberties? Is the ACLU suddenly Anti-Castro?
March 29th, 2007 at 11:02 am
Cummings, you really need to look into the history of the ACLU a little more closely:
In the face of this attack, liberal organizations turned their backs on radicals–and in many cases joined in. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), instead of defending communists, conducted its own witch-hunt to oust radicals from its ranks–such as ACLU founding member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. It was later discovered that throughout the McCarthy years, the ACLU dutifully reported the names of communists to the FBI.
full: http://www.socialistworker.org/2005-1/538/538_06_McCarthyism.shtml
March 29th, 2007 at 11:02 am
Marc Cooper is an obese, corporate journalist pretending that he is some kind of leftist. Uggghhhh.
March 29th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Since I am not an expert on Cuba and most of the names mentioned on this thread are completely unkown to me I cannot definitively say one side or the other is wrong. But I do find it interesting that certain people people like Leftside and Mr Smith get mighty angry when anyone suggests that Fidel and the Cuban regime in power today have any warts. I would have thought that the experience on the Left of defending Stalin, Mao, Hoxha and others whose carreers have, shall we say, left them open to criticism might have led to a more nuanced response.
Has the US tried to subvert the Cuban Revolution?
Sure
Is Cuba an Open Society that allows, if not encourages dissent?
No (and don’t take my word for it. Take Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International – or are they nothing but “Imperialist Tools” of Hegamonic America?)
Have the Cubans had some impressive accomplishments?
You’d have to be a fool not to notice their health care system actually exports Docs and medicines to needy third world countries. And they are still there despite the loss of their patron the USSR. That is impressive. I doubt the Israelis will be able to say the same when we pull the plug (after our Chinese bankers take away our credit card).
But would I want to live there? Would you? I think the answer is obvious. Just as it is obvious that after Fidel leaves the stage it will be the people on that island and not the exiles in Miami or the NED that will determine the place’s future. Oh, and that includes the old lefties here and abroad that have invested so much in the place as their “Last Best Hope.”
Now I’ll sign off and wait for the brickbats to come flying my way from both sides.
March 29th, 2007 at 11:35 am
(This is an apropos article by Saul Landau that I submit. In other words it is not a direct response by Saul Landau himself.–J.B.)
PROGRESO WEEKLY
March 20, 2007
http://www.progresoweekly.com/
Comparing Padillas, homosexuality and murder
By Saul Landau
Bush behavior – practicing torture, violating human rights and
wrapping itself in secrecy while preaching the opposite – has given
deceit a bad name. W didn’t begin the double speak and double
standards patter, however.
In 1971, U.S. troops and bombers routinely massacred Vietnamese,
Laotians and Cambodians. In that same year, Cuban police arrested a
poet, Heberto Padilla, without charging him. Hundreds of U.S. and
European intellectuals and academics who had opposed against the U.S.
wars reserved a special kind of outrage when unsubstantiated rumors
spread that Padilla had undergone brutal torture. Petitions
circulated demanding that Cuba stop torturing this great poet,
although no one had seen or heard any direct evidence of such
mistreatment.
After 38 days, Cuba’s state security cops sprung Padilla, who then
delivered his notorious speech (1930s Stalin purge style imitation
confession) to writers and artists, condemning his “bourgeois” and
“counterrevolutionary behavior”, and naming other writers as also
responsible for their misguided comportment. It didn’t matter whether
he invented the speech as a kind of literary ruse to mock state
security or the cops had pressured him to deliver this mea culpa.
Padilla became an instant pariah – a fink and coward — in Cuban
intellectual circles.
His book of poems, Fuera del Juego (Out of the Game), won the UNEAC
(Artists and Writers Union) poetry prize in 1968. Cuba published the
book with a foreword by UNEAC reprimanding Padilla for his behavior.
Over the ensuing months and years after his arrest, I talked with
Padilla who laughed at the campaign to stop his supposed torture.
He had suffered a severe nervous reaction to getting arrested, he
recounted The cops panicked over his stomach pains and they rushed
him to a seaside resort, fed him yogurt and provided on-call doctors.
Throughout the 1970s, Cuban intellectuals would cross the street when
they saw Padilla. A few felt sorry for him and his
reputation-blanching mistake: making the mea culpa statement. Padilla
admitted to me that the security people had behaved considerately.
But we agreed they had no right to arrest him – just because he had
written and spoken dissenting words in brilliant poems and bad
mouthed Fidel and the revolution to foreign visitors. His arrest
correctly provoked leading world intellectuals to respond in outrage.
Cuba deserved condemnation for having arrested Padilla, but not for
torturing him since he wasn’t tortured or threatened with torture.
Padilla lived quietly in Havana for several years afterwards,
receiving a good salary from the state. In 1980, he moved to the
United States where he taught at Princeton and then at Auburn
University. He died of a heart attack in 2000, a lonely man.
Another Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Jose of Puerto Rican descent, holds
no claim to the intellectual spotlight. Intellectuals have not
rallied to the cause of this former street gang member who converted
to Islam. In February, in a Miami courtroom, the world public learned
- those few who read about it – that after September 11 U.S.
interrogators used “unusual” methods to “break” prisoners.
Unlike Cuban state security who fed Heberto yogurt, the U.S.
torturers offered Jose sleep interruption, sound blasting and mind
altering drugs. They broke Padilla, but not exactly in the way they
wanted. The Bushies had planned to try him as an international
terrorist, but his lawyers argued that the long years of torture
while in captivity had left him insane and therefore not fit to stand
trial. The judge disagreed, but the gruesome details are starting to
emerge.
In May 2002 U.S. agents grabbed Padilla at Chicago’s O’Hare airport,
classified him “enemy combatant,” and threw him into a tiny,
windowless cell in a Navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. They
shackled Padilla, covered his eyes with goggles and his ears with
headphones — for more than 3 years. His interrogators forbade him
contact with lawyers or family members, but they did keep bright
lights turned on him and blasted his auditory nerves with loud
sounds. Padilla claims they injected him “truth serum,” or, perhaps
as his lawyers believe LSD or PCP.
Two professionals examined him and determined he had been physically
destroyed, and thus unable to assist in his own defense. He thinks of
his lawyers as interrogators, not as defenders. As Naomi Klein wrote
(The Nation, March 12, 2007), in order to prove that “the extended
torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged,” his lawyers
want to tell the court what happened during those years in the Navy
brig. The government strenuously objects, maintaining that “Padilla
is competent,” that the treatment he received is irrelevant.
Compare the intellectual outrage in Heberto Padilla’s case with the
relatively muted response by leading intellectuals and artists to
Jose Padilla’s treatment. The outcry of human rights violations
around the Cuban poet was literally deafening; the silence on Jose
Padilla rings louder still. His case drags on as torture claims from
U.S. prisons multiply.
In 1971, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag, led a
list of distinguished writers. They held Fidel Castro responsible for
directing Heberto’s torture. Do intellectuals not get aroused by what
appears as yet one more George W. Bush peccadillo? Is it because most
cultured people no longer hold the assumption that the United States
holds the eternal torch for human rights and civilized behavior?
Indeed, when U.S. officials use moral hyperbole it seems to mocks the
facts of U.S. behavior. In early March, Marine Gen. Peter Pace,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly likened homosexuality
to adultery. The General vibrated his moral outrage over the prospect
of having gay soldiers serving alongside straight soldiers. Yich!!!
The military, he declared, “should not condone it by allowing gays to
serve openly in the armed forces.” In 1994, President Clinton
instituted his enigmatic “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on sexuality
- which he ironically did not use himself when he got caught in the
Monica Lewinsky scandal. Pace, the law abiding officer, claimed he of
course supported this standard, which prohibits commanders from
asking about a person’s sexual orientation.
But, Pace personally believed that “homosexual acts between two
individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.”
Pace told a reporter: “I do not believe the United States is well
served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.”
Speaking “as an individual, I would not want (acceptance of gay
behavior) to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our
policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with
somebody else’s wife, that we would just look the other way, which we
do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior,” he said.
(Pauline Jelinek, AP, March 13, 2007
Wow, I said to myself, it’s a good thing the reporter didn’t ask Pace
how he compared his moral standards on homosexual behavior with the
morality of killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians – or
indeed, if such killing by the U.S. heterosexual military was
immoral. Imagine an army that took seriously the Sixth Commandment -
You Shall Not Murder!
Given the raging fundamentalism that is sweeping across the United
States and the armed forces, it becomes puzzling to see this
Commandment become an exception. When it comes to the unborn
(abortion) or brain dead — remember Terri Schiavo? — the
fundamentalists reach their pinnacle of moral indignation.
Somewhere in their Bible it must say something about how angry God
gets when He sees two guys getting it on. This obviously means more
to Him than the act of slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent
people in Iraq, which was the U.S. army’s job. Is there no
Commandment that says: “Thou shalt not bugger the neighbor”? There’s
one about not “coveting your neighbor’s wife, or male or female
slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
But when U.S. soldiers stole from and raped Iraqis wholesale after
they invaded in March 2003, Pace expressed no moral indignation.
In the 1970s, Cuba mistakenly arrested Heberto Padilla, an act that
symbolized the restriction of creativity. Subsequently, the
government reversed those policies. In the last two decades, Cuban
music, literature and especially cinema has offered profound
critiques of its social order. Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s “Strawberry and
Chocolate” and “Guantanamera” ridicule Party line thinking and
bureaucracy.
Bush and company have not taken responsibility for the injustice done
to Jose Padilla and thousands more held without charges, many of them
tortured. “Mistakes were made!” Bush chants this mantra when his
murderous errors in Iraq are revealed.
The Heberto Padilla case still resonates with the notion of
censorship, but it no longer represents Cuba cultural policy. The
Jose Padilla case stands as the insignia of current U.S. justice
standards.
Landau’s new book is A BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD. His new film, WE DON’T
PLAY GOLF HERE is available on dvd from roundworldmedia@gmail.com
March 29th, 2007 at 11:37 am
(This is an apropos article by Saul Landau that I submit. In other words it is not a direct response by Saul Landau himself.–J.B.)
PROGRESO WEEKLY
March 20, 2007
http://www.progresoweekly.com/
Comparing Padillas, homosexuality and murder
By Saul Landau
Bush behavior – practicing torture, violating human rights and
wrapping itself in secrecy while preaching the opposite – has given
deceit a bad name. W didn’t begin the double speak and double
standards patter, however.
In 1971, U.S. troops and bombers routinely massacred Vietnamese,
Laotians and Cambodians. In that same year, Cuban police arrested a
poet, Heberto Padilla, without charging him. Hundreds of U.S. and
European intellectuals and academics who had opposed against the U.S.
wars reserved a special kind of outrage when unsubstantiated rumors
spread that Padilla had undergone brutal torture. Petitions
circulated demanding that Cuba stop torturing this great poet,
although no one had seen or heard any direct evidence of such
mistreatment.
After 38 days, Cuba’s state security cops sprung Padilla, who then
delivered his notorious speech (1930s Stalin purge style imitation
confession) to writers and artists, condemning his “bourgeois” and
“counterrevolutionary behavior”, and naming other writers as also
responsible for their misguided comportment. It didn’t matter whether
he invented the speech as a kind of literary ruse to mock state
security or the cops had pressured him to deliver this mea culpa.
Padilla became an instant pariah – a fink and coward — in Cuban
intellectual circles.
His book of poems, Fuera del Juego (Out of the Game), won the UNEAC
(Artists and Writers Union) poetry prize in 1968. Cuba published the
book with a foreword by UNEAC reprimanding Padilla for his behavior.
Over the ensuing months and years after his arrest, I talked with
Padilla who laughed at the campaign to stop his supposed torture.
He had suffered a severe nervous reaction to getting arrested, he
recounted The cops panicked over his stomach pains and they rushed
him to a seaside resort, fed him yogurt and provided on-call doctors.
Throughout the 1970s, Cuban intellectuals would cross the street when
they saw Padilla. A few felt sorry for him and his
reputation-blanching mistake: making the mea culpa statement. Padilla
admitted to me that the security people had behaved considerately.
But we agreed they had no right to arrest him – just because he had
written and spoken dissenting words in brilliant poems and bad
mouthed Fidel and the revolution to foreign visitors. His arrest
correctly provoked leading world intellectuals to respond in outrage.
Cuba deserved condemnation for having arrested Padilla, but not for
torturing him since he wasn’t tortured or threatened with torture.
Padilla lived quietly in Havana for several years afterwards,
receiving a good salary from the state. In 1980, he moved to the
United States where he taught at Princeton and then at Auburn
University. He died of a heart attack in 2000, a lonely man.
Another Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Jose of Puerto Rican descent, holds
no claim to the intellectual spotlight. Intellectuals have not
rallied to the cause of this former street gang member who converted
to Islam. In February, in a Miami courtroom, the world public learned
- those few who read about it – that after September 11 U.S.
interrogators used “unusual” methods to “break” prisoners.
Unlike Cuban state security who fed Heberto yogurt, the U.S.
torturers offered Jose sleep interruption, sound blasting and mind
altering drugs. They broke Padilla, but not exactly in the way they
wanted. The Bushies had planned to try him as an international
terrorist, but his lawyers argued that the long years of torture
while in captivity had left him insane and therefore not fit to stand
trial. The judge disagreed, but the gruesome details are starting to
emerge.
In May 2002 U.S. agents grabbed Padilla at Chicago’s O’Hare airport,
classified him “enemy combatant,” and threw him into a tiny,
windowless cell in a Navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. They
shackled Padilla, covered his eyes with goggles and his ears with
headphones — for more than 3 years. His interrogators forbade him
contact with lawyers or family members, but they did keep bright
lights turned on him and blasted his auditory nerves with loud
sounds. Padilla claims they injected him “truth serum,” or, perhaps
as his lawyers believe LSD or PCP.
Two professionals examined him and determined he had been physically
destroyed, and thus unable to assist in his own defense. He thinks of
his lawyers as interrogators, not as defenders. As Naomi Klein wrote
(The Nation, March 12, 2007), in order to prove that “the extended
torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged,” his lawyers
want to tell the court what happened during those years in the Navy
brig. The government strenuously objects, maintaining that “Padilla
is competent,” that the treatment he received is irrelevant.
Compare the intellectual outrage in Heberto Padilla’s case with the
relatively muted response by leading intellectuals and artists to
Jose Padilla’s treatment. The outcry of human rights violations
around the Cuban poet was literally deafening; the silence on Jose
Padilla rings louder still. His case drags on as torture claims from
U.S. prisons multiply.
In 1971, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag, led a
list of distinguished writers. They held Fidel Castro responsible for
directing Heberto’s torture. Do intellectuals not get aroused by what
appears as yet one more George W. Bush peccadillo? Is it because most
cultured people no longer hold the assumption that the United States
holds the eternal torch for human rights and civilized behavior?
Indeed, when U.S. officials use moral hyperbole it seems to mocks the
facts of U.S. behavior. In early March, Marine Gen. Peter Pace,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly likened homosexuality
to adultery. The General vibrated his moral outrage over the prospect
of having gay soldiers serving alongside straight soldiers. Yich!!!
The military, he declared, “should not condone it by allowing gays to
serve openly in the armed forces.” In 1994, President Clinton
instituted his enigmatic “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on sexuality
- which he ironically did not use himself when he got caught in the
Monica Lewinsky scandal. Pace, the law abiding officer, claimed he of
course supported this standard, which prohibits commanders from
asking about a person’s sexual orientation.
But, Pace personally believed that “homosexual acts between two
individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.”
Pace told a reporter: “I do not believe the United States is well
served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.”
Speaking “as an individual, I would not want (acceptance of gay
behavior) to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our
policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with
somebody else’s wife, that we would just look the other way, which we
do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior,” he said.
(Pauline Jelinek, AP, March 13, 2007
Wow, I said to myself, it’s a good thing the reporter didn’t ask Pace
how he compared his moral standards on homosexual behavior with the
morality of killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians – or
indeed, if such killing by the U.S. heterosexual military was
immoral. Imagine an army that took seriously the Sixth Commandment -
You Shall Not Murder!
Given the raging fundamentalism that is sweeping across the United
States and the armed forces, it becomes puzzling to see this
Commandment become an exception. When it comes to the unborn
(abortion) or brain dead — remember Terri Schiavo? — the
fundamentalists reach their pinnacle of moral indignation.
Somewhere in their Bible it must say something about how angry God
gets when He sees two guys getting it on. This obviously means more
to Him than the act of slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent
people in Iraq, which was the U.S. army’s job. Is there no
Commandment that says: “Thou shalt not bugger the neighbor”? There’s
one about not “coveting your neighbor’s wife, or male or female
slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
But when U.S. soldiers stole from and raped Iraqis wholesale after
they invaded in March 2003, Pace expressed no moral indignation.
In the 1970s, Cuba mistakenly arrested Heberto Padilla, an act that
symbolized the restriction of creativity. Subsequently, the
government reversed those policies. In the last two decades, Cuban
music, literature and especially cinema has offered profound
critiques of its social order. Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s “Strawberry and
Chocolate” and “Guantanamera” ridicule Party line thinking and
bureaucracy.
Bush and company have not taken responsibility for the injustice done
to Jose Padilla and thousands more held without charges, many of them
tortured. “Mistakes were made!” Bush chants this mantra when his
murderous errors in Iraq are revealed.
The Heberto Padilla case still resonates with the notion of
censorship, but it no longer represents Cuba cultural policy. The
Jose Padilla case stands as the insignia of current U.S. justice
standards.
Landau’s new book is A BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD. His new film, WE DON’T
PLAY GOLF HERE is available on dvd from roundworldmedia@gmail.com
March 29th, 2007 at 11:43 am
“why the perjoratives about the ACLU?”
jc – Think about it.
The more Smith posts, the more pathetic he appears…
And the desperation of invokiing Guantanamo to rationalize the persistent criminalization of organized political opposition to Fidel is proof that there’s no coherent case being made – just ad hoc relativism. If you’ve got to invoke Bush’s trampling on the Constitutioni to make Castro supposedly look good, you’re in Neverfuckingland politically.
March 29th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
RL, I doubt most Americans would want to live in any developing country, but if the best you can come up with after all this is a variation on “love it or leave it,” then we’re probably at the end of the rope.
I’ve never said Cuba was perfect, but it does give me some hope that the immense problems America faces are solvable. Basically I’ve come to this conclusion – everything America does badly Cuba excells at and everything America does well, Cuba is bad at. It is called the difference between who owns the means of production, that old boring Marxist concept. In the end we all decide what values are most important and find models that do well in those areas. I happen to feel strongest about health care for all, homelessness for no one, high levels of education for all, fear of crime for no one. Working as an urban planner I see that only socialism allows one to fix up a neighborhood and not kick all the poor out of the area at the same time. Basically only socialism allows for justice. You still have to fight for it, but only when natural private greed is taken out of the equation can we even begin to talk about equality of opportunity.
March 29th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
While we’re on the subject of Saul Landau’s remarks which I believed appeared in COUNTERPUNCH I want to go off topic slightly and comment on an article that appeared there he other day. It was written by someone called “Mikey Z” and basically asserted that whatever happened to Pat Tillman in Afghanistan he sort of had it coming since he voluntarily enlisted for an “Imperialistic” venture and was, therefore, something of an enambler of warmongers. I guess he meant anyone in the US military.
You know this is something that I’m surprised we don’t see or hear more of from some on the “Left” because it was a lot more common during Vietnam. While I never saw or heard of anyone being spit on the story had to start somewhere and there plenty of people in the sixties only too willing to tar anyone in uniform as a “Babykiller.” Maybe old Mikey is just a throwback but every time some one like him writes articles like that they make it easy for the Jonah Goldbergs and Bill O’Reillys of the world to go into their Ward Churchill number.
(and its not just Tillman. I remember back in 2000 Jeff Cohen of FAIR criticizing the media for calling John McCain a War Hero because, according to Cohen McCain’s actions as a Navy pilot made him a “War Criminal” and the N Vietnamese could have tried him as such – implying, I guess, that his stay in the “Hanoi Hilon” was deserved. You want to criticize the media for slavering over “Honest John” fine. But all Cohen did was show his bias. “Fairness?” I think not)
Actually it is relevant to this whole discussion. If, like the Red Queen, you are willing to believe twenty impossible things before breakfast, you should not be surprised if your’re not taken seriously.
March 29th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Most interesting, I must say that simply reading Mr. Cooper’s responses here, its safe to say that arrogance is one of his weaknesses would you not agree?
Let me simplify a tad the problem with Cuba, having lived there for a few years, I will be the FIRST to tell you that it is a controlled environment, but to read Reg, and Cooper’s comments you would actually think that the US had nothing to do with it, and when they do admit it is like a small footnote about “shortsighted” US policy. Easy for you to say my friends!
Let me ask you this, if you had been targeted for assasination say a FEW HUNDRED times that we actually know about, would you be so willing to just open up your arms and say “well let bygones be bygones”? All these “liberal” types as always assume NO responsibility with what US foreign policy has done to Cuba, which before you get all bent out of shape, does not justify the stupid moves made by the bureaucracy.
Having lived in Cuba and been born in Chile I tend to appreciate the achievements of Cuba a whole load more than most “liberal” US types. In short once the US stops funding, and promoting the overthrow and assasination of the revolution leadership then we can get all nice and picky about the real and imagined shortcomings of the Cuban revolution, till then Fidel would be commiting suicide listening to you.
Nothing more irritating than a turncoat that AFTER making the switch lets us know how he knows EVERYONE in the power structure, makes you look a tad desperate to give weight to your argument. Also Reg’s assertion that Fidel’s actions have “If anything, he’s been an impediment to successful democratic progressivism south of our border” reminds me that Reg is stuck in Cuba post Berlin Wall fall, and has not bothered to read about all the progressive goverments that have come to power in Latin America that actually mention Cuba as an inspiration.
Unsurprisingly the view among a whole lot of Latin Americans regarding Cuba is ohhhh so different than the North American one. Reg talks about the Cuban economy being stagnant; a real fair lie, I was there during the WORSE part of the “special period” when Cuba lost almost all their external trade, and while there are a million and one things that still need to be improved, things are improving, am not surprised that Reg doesnt take health and education as important accomplishments, but then again I think he would have to be born in Haiti or the subsahara dessert to actually appreciate that….
In closing criticism of the Cuban government is quite restricted is true, but until the Cubans can themselves take care of their issues, real ones by the way, and until the defacto war declaration that successive US administrations have carried out against Cuba, simply to just bow down to Cooper’s remarks would be suicide.
March 29th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
You know, Mikhail, let me remind you that the Cuban revolution is supposed to be about the people of Cuba — not the person of Fidel Castro.
By your lour logic, when Al Qaeda bombed the Pentagon our response should have been…..? What? Close The New York Times? Declare all arabs to be “gusanos” and take away their passports. Suspend elections? Impose what you so-daintily call a “controlled environment.” Do you mean a police state? Or is this environment you describe only half=pregnant?
Yours is but the mirror argument that we have heard for fifty years from the National Security types on both continents. We must be tough and ruthless lest we commit suicide, to use the term you share with the neo-cons in describing civil liberties.
I simply remain amazed with what sort of ease you are willing to bargain away the rights of others.
I was also in Cuba during the Special Period. I hope it’s gotten better since then as I rememver the curator of dilapidated Havana zoo complaining to me of people coming to steal and eat the ducks. He turned that into a joke…at least/ One wily duck broke free of its captors grip and, the story goes, he did a circle wing tip in the air, his wing feathers pointed out like a victory sign as he gratefully sang “Socialism or Death! Socialism or Death!
One personal note: you gosh-darned right I reserve the right to be arrogant. Not only is it fun, but I earn it by taking mounds of anonymous personal abuse from those too cowardly to use their names. I know this is hard to believe but isnt always fun to be accused of having an American flag up my ass, being on the NED payroll, or being just plain corpulent! Im a big enough person (no pun) to usually allow such idiots to contine posting anyway on my bandwith… but the least I can do is smack’em back now and them.
If you don’t like this site, I suggest you log on at a Havana Internet Cafe where your choices will be so much simpler. I hear that the authorized .cu net is, um, quite controlled.
March 29th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
” to read Reg, and Cooper’s comments you would actually think that the US had nothing to do with it”
Bullshit…a bogus prelude to the same-old-same-old.
“am not surprised that Reg doesnt take health and education as important accomplishment” More crap…I’ve mentioned it several times in the context of my remarks. Either read all of this shit or don’t make blanket statements about others comments.
I’m still waiting for one of these sycophantic assholes to comment on Fidels admitted pushback against a negotiated settlement to the missile crisis in ’61. A fucking megalomaniac…
What lame recycled arguments these guys trot out…
The arrogance of far-Leftists regarding what rights are or are not good for other people amazes me. In the unlikely event I ever hear their blather about “revolution” in any context other than the margins of the margins where they normally reside, I’ll reach for my pistol.
March 29th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Reg many years ago I visited a friend in the Philosphy Grad program at SF State and was introduced to a group of young radicals who called themselves “Left Hegelians” and was assured by same that concerns for civil liberties was a “Bougeois indulgence” So there!
March 29th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Cognac and Cuban cigars are bourgeois indulgence. Civil liberties ? Not so much.
March 29th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Ok Marc, dont get all bent out of shape, I never said it was just about Fidel, but since he is the Devil Incarnate in your eyes, I simply suggested that if I WAS Fidel I likely be paraphrasing my dear foul mouthed friend Reg, by”reaching for my pistol” but then again that might be the outcome of living in Northamerica for such a long time, you end up loving them guns!;)
Listen, in an ideal world, IDEAL being the key word, I have NOOOO issues with anyone saying that Fidel is a dick, you see am pretty sure Fidel can defend himself, what I don’t buy for a minute is this supposed “logic” am putting out there, first of all Al Qaeda is stuffed with plenty of CIA trained fellas starting with Bin laden. What am saying as a Latin American if you can wrap your head around that, is that until the United States stops its campaign of REAL terrorism against Cuba, there is no way in hell I will attempt to dictate to a small little island what and how they should run their affairs. Can you understand THAT? and just merely out of amusement if YOU were Fidel and say you had 2 billion assassination attempts after you, just how open to dialogue would YOU be? we already know Reg would have snapped half way through them!lol
For the fanatics of Civil Rights I never said they werent important but by god people they are not the ONLY human rights that matter. From the comfort of a driveway and a high speed internet connection perhaps is the last step of your evolution, but get a grip, if you are soooo concerned about human rights you be working side by side with the thousands of Cuban doctors doing work in the most forgotten corners of the world.
In short while I think criticism of Cuba is necessary and a good thing, I will never become part of the machinery that looks at Cuba’s faults with an enormous magnifying glass, while we all know there are dozens of places FAR FAR FAR worse.
Ohh as per your take on the slowly recuperating city of Havana, well you are looking in part of your own government’s doing, so in that sense I suppose is easy to laugh at your victims….
One last point. you point to how easy am “willing to bargain away the rights of others” I never claimed such power!;) I simply said that from my understanding of the current situation until the US gets the hell out of Cuban affairs and everyone else’s for that matter I wont become part of a well paid and well publicized smear campaign, and that whatever criticisms I have of the way things are run there I will make in such a way that will be constructive, based on my knowledge that the Cuban revolution has done a world of good in the 3rd world as well, Cuba was considered particularly dangerous because it sank so low as to direct resources to the benefit of the poor majority and, even worse, to support popular movements elsewhere that sought freedom from US-imposed or -backed monsters like Pinochet. Another major crime was Cuba’s contributions to health and welfare in poor and suffering countries, absolutely without precedent, and considered extremely dangerous, particularly in the light of the sordid record of those who have the wealth to confront and overcome those problems were they not to choose to exacerbate them, yes am talking about the UNITED STATES in particular. If you dont believe me about Cuba’s contribution to the world, ask Nelson Mandela he will give you a book’s worth of it.
March 30th, 2007 at 12:54 am
Reg, I let the Missle Crisis discussion go cuz there was so much other low hanging fruit. But please allow give your version of Fidel as “Dr Stangelove” analogy an alternative reading. Perhaps we need to first set the stage.
In October 1962, Kennedy’s terrorist “operation mongoose” was in full swiing. Power plants, bridges and sugar cane fields were being burned and Cubans shot at by the same Miami mafia running things today. 2 months before JFK orders plans for an invasion to be drawn up, including covert actions to help set the mood in US and Cuba (many crazy ideas were bandered about). Fidel first asks the US authorities to stop, then takes it to the impotent UN. Finally Fidel asks for defensive help from the Soviets. Little does he know, nukes get delivered on one of those ships. Fidel is pissed.
On October 22nd, a day or 2 before the infamous satellite photos were taken, the US formally hands off its nuclear missles to the Turkish government, 100 miles from Russia proper. The crisis ensues and Kennedy strikes a hard line, refusing to do the one simple thing to end the crisis = pledge to take US hands off Cuba and stop the attacks (he had to remove the turkey nukes too). JFK would not budge on that one thing, instead risking everything for many tense days. Things nearly went very bad in the sea, after the US stupidly attacked Soviet submarines. We were this close. At that point Fidel was out of the US-Soviet loop. His letters to Kruschev were rebuffed. He urged Kruschev not to give in until Cuba’s independence was protected. In his fury about the deal, he did say something about the effect of being willing to risk it all. It was an issue of basic fairness for him. And he saw no reason his hands had to be tied while US planes flew low over the countryside, and not try shooting them down (which he did – overuling the Soviets).
Let me allow Julia Sweig, President of the (Commie loving) Council for Foreign Relations to finish up that point:
“By the time Fidel declared the Revolution to be socialist on the eve of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, US officials had made it impossible for a moderate nationalist path of development to suceed… Knowing of America’s rejection of moderate reforms and attempts to overthrow the Castro government, Cubans grasped this truth and were even, incomprehensively to US and Soviet officials, willing to risk nuclear war to stake out their independence. “
March 30th, 2007 at 8:34 am
The Surprising New Face of Cuban Jazz
By DAVID CRONIN
WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 30, 2007
If thinking of Cuban jazz conjures up images of old men playing in a fog of cigar smoke and rum vapors, then pianist and producer Roberto Fonseca should cause you to think again. Still in his early thirties, the Havana native is the sharp-eyed, even-sharper-dressed rising star of the genre. First dazzling Cuban audiences with an appearance at the Jazz Plaza International Festival in the island’s capital when he was only 15, he has developed a growing fan base abroad over the past decade.
Despite having no experience of life before the revolution, Mr. Fonseca’s supple piano style can evoke the 1940s and 1950s, when Cuban and African-American musicians drew inspiration from each other. With his lush arrangements and frequent shifts in tempo, his work also betrays the eclecticism of someone who has dabbled in everything from vintage R&B to the grinding beats of rap.
Aficionados of Cuban music focus on three pianists from the island: Rubén González, Lili MartÃnez and Pedro Jústiz (better known by his stage-name PeruchÃn). Judging by the praise he’s received from his elders — “Boy, can the kid play!” was how Grammy-winning crooner Ibrahim Ferrer put it — and by his experience as a protégé of Mr. González, Mr. Fonseca may soon join that list.
Mr. Fonseca produced “Mi Sueño” (My Dream), the final album by Mr. Ferrer, who died in 2005 after a monthlong concert tour in Europe. On the album, Mr. Fonseca helped Mr. Ferrer realize a longstanding ambition of recording a series of tender love songs called boleros, two of which he performed memorably with Omara Portuondo for Wim Wenders’s 1999 movie “Buena Vista Social Club.”
Mr. Fonseca is also promoting his fourth solo album, “Zamazu,” in which he combines his passion for Afro-Cuban jazz with South American grooves and rhythms. As well as his compatriots, Ms. Portuondo and the bassist Orlando “CachaÃto” López, he recruited two of the most illustrious figures in Brazilian music for its recording sessions: the producer Alê Siqueira and the singer-drummer Carlinhos Brown.
Mr. Fonseca’s European tour for the disc will take him to Vienna (April 15), Munich (April 17), Madrid (April 26), Amsterdam (April 28), Brussels (April 29), Paris (May 9) and London (May 20).
Born in 1975, Mr. Fonseca was eight when he began learning the piano and 14 when he started composing. But he initially entered show business as a drummer with a Beatles tribute band. His interest in drums has encouraged him to explore the percussive qualities of the piano.
In 2000, Mr. Fonseca was invited to join the Orquesta Ibrahim Ferrer, as support to the aging Rubén González. He spent hours observing the stately ivory-tinkling of Mr. González, who made his recording debut with the band-leader Arsenio Rodriguez in the 1940s.
A year later, Mr. Fonseca became the youngest member of the Buena Vista Social Club lineup, taking the place occupied by Mr. González on his retirement.
Mr. Fonseca spoke to David Cronin in Brussels.
Q: Did you grow up in a musical family?
Yes, there was music in our house 24 hours a day. My mum played the piano and was a ballerina and my father was a drummer. I also have two brothers: one plays piano, the other drums.
My mum was always singing boleros or classical melodies like those from the Romeo and Juliet opera, whereas my brothers listened to soul, funk and jazz.
I used to hear a lot of jazz on the radio, too. The first cassette I bought was of Keith Jarrett.
Q: You played drums in your youth. Why did you decide to concentrate on the piano?
The piano is one of the most complete instruments. You can use it to make melodies or harmonies or as the rhythm section. When I realized that, I decided to make the transition.
Q: What was it like being recruited to the Buena Vista Social Club?
I was a little scared. I greatly admired Rubén González and I said to myself “I don’t want to replace him.” So, I just tried to bring my own influences and put my own touch.
Q: It’s more than a decade now since the Buena Vista Social Club album was recorded and it remains one of the top-selling world music albums in some European countries. Do you have any explanation for its enduring popularity?
The music on that album is really fresh, clear, deep and natural. I think people can relate to that.
The other reason it’s so popular is that it features amazing musicians: Ibrahim Ferrer, Rubén González, CachaÃto López, Guajiro Mirabal. The most wonderful thing that I noticed was the range of people in our audience: from teenagers to old guys. This is music that doesn’t age.
Q: How do you feel about producing the last album that Ibrahim Ferrer recorded?
I think it’s one of the most beautiful albums I’ll ever work on because I realized that Ibrahim was trying to pour all his life into it.
Q: Did you have any sense at the time that he didn’t have long to live?
No, he seemed to be fine. He never gave any signs of being sick. It was horrible, and it’s still horrible. He was like my grandfather, always teaching me different things about music and life.
He was really famous, this superstar of Cuban music, yet he never acted like that. He was a simple guy, with no ego. The most beautiful thing he helped me learn is no matter how important you are, you should never forget where you come from.
Q: You have played with Western jazz musicians, including Herbie Hancock. What was that like?
I was touring with Omara Portuondo in Japan and we were at the same festival as Herbie Hancock. At the end of his shows, Herbie used to call different musicians to jam with him. I was really surprised when he called me and when we played on the same piano. He is one of the best piano players in the world; he’s like an idol for me.
Q: You’ve also worked with the Cuban hip-hop act Obsesión. Do you think the growth of hip-hop in Cuba poses any threat to more traditional idioms?
We listen to a lot of different music in Cuba: hip-hop, rock, jazz. I’m open to new ways of playing Cuban music. My new album is not the same as the older Cuban stuff you can hear. Cuban music is in a new age but we’ll never turn our backs on traditional music because it’s so beautiful.
Q: How did you become interested in Brazilian music?
Cuba and Brazil are really similar. We have Afro-Cuban music; they have Afro-Brazilian. With this new album, we did the percussion and drums in Carlinhos Brown’s studio in Bahia. Alê Siqueira is a great musician and a great producer. He showed respect for all my ideas and was always determined to bring this baby to life.
Q: What does the title Zamazu mean?
Zamazu is a word that my niece made up. I liked it because everyone can pronounce Zamazu without a problem, no matter where they come from. I like language that doesn’t have limits. The same goes for music.
Q: You’ve teamed up with the fashion designer Agnès B, who is responsible for the suave outfits you wear onstage, including the Byblos cotton and PVC hat featured on your new album cover. Are you very image-conscious?
I met Agnès B, when she came to one of Ibrahim’s concerts. I use her clothes because they give me a style that I really like. It’s important for me to look good to people. When I look good, I feel good.
Q: Are you religious?
Yes, I believe in the Afro-Cuban religion Yoruba, which is similar to Catholicism. My music is 100% about spirituality and soul.
Q: Do you think the end of the Fidel Castro era will have any implications for Cuban music?
That political stuff is for the Cuban embassy. I’ve come here to talk about music.
Q: But as an artist, do you feel any obligation to protest about how the Havana authorities have imprisoned and denied freedom of expression to their political opponents?
No, I don’t feel any obligation. I’ve had a freedom in playing music and I’ve had a lot of support within Cuba and outside Cuba. I’ve gone to the U.S. many times and traveled around the world without any problems.
March 30th, 2007 at 9:27 am
The special pleading continues ….
People play music, it’s not the worst place on the planet, how dare we “dictate” to Fidel (the irony of that question is apparently lost.)
These people are incapable of dealing with issues straightforward. The issue is over political freedom in Cuba, not how much freedom exists at the margins for, say, jazz musicians to follow their fancy. (Since so many artists have defected, that’s clearly an issue, but it’s not addressing the central question of a one-party state.)
And I’m still waiting for one of them to explain to me how the benevolent, wise Fidel was totally justified in his attempt to persuade Khurschev not to negotiate an end to the missile crisis, but rather saw it as “revolutionary” to push the confrontation harder, even to the point of starting a nuclear war. Presumably the reason is that he was simply responding in kind to the imperialists. In which case any adventuristic bullshit can be justified in this cold, cruel world as “revolutionary”. This ugly episode of sheer megalomania is on the record – in the archives of Khruschev’s papers and in Fidel’s own conversations with Robert MacNamara. I find it incredible.
I’m also waiting for some explanation of how an economy that is dependent on remittances from the imperialist beast by “gusano” relatives can be seen as any kind of model for anyone, anywhere. Absurd…
Nobody’s “dictating” to Fidel. All we’re suggesting is that he quit dictating to the Cuban people. Whether or not the U.S. eases its embargo or has neo-conservative hardliners dictating our policies. Most twelve-year olds could understand this distinction. I can sit here surrounded by Buena Vista Social Club cds and still maintain minimal standards of judgement when it comes to political systems without having my head explode. I don’t dictate shit – but I can damn well exercise some discretion about who I will and will not add to my pantheon of heroes. Fidel is not one of them for some pretty fundamental reasons. People who tout him, to put it bluntly, are the ones who think it’s okay to dictate conditions to the Cuban people. The notion that these lefties give a shit about the Cuban people is a bad joke. They’re ideological sychophants and phonies who, in debate, prove themselves sock puppets for a failed system.
March 30th, 2007 at 9:52 am
Reg, did my Missle Crisis response not get posted (it shows as waiting moderation still… 10 hours after I posted it). I don’t think anyone could argue with a straight face that Castro was more to blame than Kennedy for the near nuclear war.
Did you also not get my response on remittances, which are a far smaller portion of the Cuban economy than any other comparable country in the hemisphere?
And just beause some musicians leave Cuba for fame and money, does not mean it is an issue of freedom. I don’t think you’ll find quotes from any recent defectors who claim it was about anything but money… even though Cuba’s artists are allowed to keep most of their earnings from around the world.
March 30th, 2007 at 10:15 am
Castro argues with a straight face that he opposed the negotiated settlement between Kennedy and Khruschev – so yes, he was “more to blame” in the final accounting for promoting a disastrous avenue. I don’t think we can say that Curtis LeMay was “more to blame” than Kennedy or Khruschev for the crisis itself, but it’s clear to anyone with their head screwed on that he was pushing a lunatic strategy for dealing with it once the game was on. And Castro was just as crazy in his counsel. Inexcusable. Except, no doubt, from such as you.
I’ll check out comparative remittance statistics, but overall the notion that Cuba is a successful economic model is ridiculous. Their years of dependence on Soviet aid as its political client were proof enough of that.
March 30th, 2007 at 10:22 am
I don’t think you’ll find quotes from any recent defectors who claim it was about anything but money
Claudia Marquez and Raúl Rivero would disagree with you.
March 30th, 2007 at 10:31 am
I was talking about musicians…. plus we’ve already discussed Rivero and the way he made his living in Havana telling Western newspapers what they like to hear. But since in Spain, I don’t recall reading a thing by him. He is probably drinking himself to death from what I hear. As far as Mrs. Marquez, she printing a intellectually challenged magazine called “de Cuba” with the help of the US Interests Section. The USIS was actually the publishing house for that magazine.
So we are still waiting for one name not connected to the US.
March 30th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Reg, Castro opposed a deal between the US and USSR that left Cuba’s defenses completely out in the cold – at a time of near open warfare from US funded and trained groups. If you were President of Cuba would you have accepted a deal that allowed terrorist bombings and sabotage to continue, with the effort of removing a Revolution supported by 90% of Cubans (that number comes from the CIA head Brian Latell)?
A week after the settlement of the crisis a bomb ripped through an industrial plant killing nearly 400 people in Cuba. A little bit later assasination attempts began in earnest. The day Kennedy died an agent was in Cuba to perform the mission.
March 30th, 2007 at 10:56 am
He is probably drinking himself to death from what I hear.
Slime and defend. Lovely.
March 30th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Gonzalo Rubalcaba left Cuba for the Dominican Republic, yet he has no ties to any political group.
As for your comments about Rivero, they are beneath contempt. He won the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize for 2004. The jury that awarded him the prize consisted of the following professional journalists:
Oliver Clarke, Chairman of Gleaner Company Limited (Jamaica); Kavi Chongkittavorn, Managing Editor of The Nation (Thailand); Souleymane Diallo, Director of Lynx and La Lance (Guinea); Kunda Dixit, Editor and Publisher of the Nepali Times (Nepal); Yosri Fouda, Deputy Director of Al Jazeera Satellite Channel Ltd; Valérie Gatabazi, President of the Association Rwandaise des Femmes Journalistes (Rwanda); Maria Carmen Gurruchaga Basurto, Director of Primer Café of Antena 3 Television (Spain); Marvin Kalb, Senior Fellow, Shorenstein Center and Faculty Chair, Kennedy School of Government (USA); Guadalupe Mantilla de Acquaviva, Executive President/Director of the Diario el Comercio (Ecuador); journalist Mohamed Larbi Messari (Morocco); ArtÅ«ras RaÄas, Editor in Chief, Business Desk, Baltic News Service (Lithuania); Veton Surroi, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Koha Ditore (Kosovo); two representatives of the Fundación Guillermo Cano (Colombia).
Marvin Kalb was the sole American journalist listed, but I’m sure you’ll find a way to claim that he exerted undue influence to persuade everyone to vote for Rivero.
March 30th, 2007 at 11:17 am
For the latest from a world leader who gives a shit I recommend:
http://www.counterpunch.org/castro03302007.html. Fidel tells it all
March 30th, 2007 at 11:40 am
Gonzalo Rubalcaba, to my knowledge has never claimed political persecution or anything other than his career in explaining his defection. That is why when he performed in Miami, a crowd of 200 demonstrators spat on concertgoers as they tried to enter the theater…. three months later a molotov cocktail through the window of another too liberal Miami jazz club forced it to close down. Those truly concerned with free speech should perhaps look to Miami first, where they ban books (Vamos a Cuba) and issue death threats to those who don’t toe the line.
March 30th, 2007 at 11:47 am
People who are interested in the state of the press in Cuba, may also be interested in this piece, that ran in the Miami Herald earlier in the year. It was a report on the Cuba’s annual journalism conference, where a top official encouraged the state-controlled media to produce more stories that reflect problems faced by the population. He also urged more utilization of the internet. Read for yourself:
The 8th National Festival of the Cuban Print Media came to a close Friday afternoon with a call for stepped up training of journalists in the new computer technologies and more effective use of the Internet to circulate Cuba’s reality and positions to combat the hostile international mass media.
Rolando Alfonso Borges, head of the Ideological Dept. of the Communist Party Central Committee, gave the closing speech. He praised the thoughtful and profound debates of the two previous days where the principal problems facing Cuban journalists were discussed in plenary panels and workshops.
Alfonso said that the Party has set as a priority to address the resource needs of the press, limited since the early 1990s as the country struggled to rebuild its economy.
Alfonso said that the Party has set as a priority to address the resource needs of the press, limited since the early 1990s as the country struggled to rebuild its economy.
“We need a press at the same height as the major transformations and needs of the Revolution,†said Alfonso adding, “People must see their problems and concerns increasingly reflected in the media. For that to happen we need investigations, a wealth of language, and creativity with professional and political responsibility.â€
…
Using the Internet as a space to exercise social justice and spread knowledge was noted by the journalists as well as the current disadvantages and other limitations in access and computer technology facing the majority of the populations in the underdeveloped world.
March 30th, 2007 at 11:50 am
So you’re arguing against the deal between Khruschev and Kennedy.
Crazier than I thought.
March 30th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Is it possible Reg, to put yourself in the place of an average Cuban? Of course the deal was in the US and USSR favor, but you can’t expect a Cuban President to have been happy at the lack of, what should have been a simple request – the end of state sponsored terrorism.
March 30th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
I certainly don’t defend the criminal and morally bankrupt behavior of the thuggish Castro opponents in Southern Florida. I also don’t defend the embargo, the travel restrictions and just about every other example of US policy towards Cuba that doesn’t relate to human rights and the defense of freedom of expression.
That appears to be a fundamental difference between you and the other Castro toadies and Marc, myself and Reg. We are capable of seeing the issue in far more shades of gray than you do. Concern with free speech is not a zero-sum proposition – except for those who wish to use it as a cudgel to criticize the points of view of those who they oppose, while ignoring the lack of same among those they support. There’s a word for that sort of thinking. I believe you know what it is.
By the way, in something that should go in the broken clock is right twice a day category, the NED supplied funding for the organization of voter registration drives in Chile during the run up to the plebiscite that ousted Pinochet. Reagan’s earlier support for Pinochet was hurting him in the court of public opinion,especially when it became clear that Pinochet had little intention of ever surrendering power. FWIW, I’m glad that the NED helped the no vote this way.
As for American officials meeting with dissidents, I deeply deplore Jeane Kirkpatrick’s refusal to meet with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Jaime Castillo in Argentina and Chile, respectively. I’m sure that the Carter administration’s UN Ambassador would have done so had he still been in office.
March 30th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Simple answer is the US did not have an active regime change policy against Picochet or the Generalismo’s in Argentina (of course it was their chief supporter. Therefore a voter registration drive, or simple diplomatic meeting is not relevant to those countries national security. Organizing the opposition, printing their newsletters, steering journalists towards the opposition and shuttling in clandestine money and materials in diplomatic pouches is quite another thing… nevermind protecting the terrorists attacking their country to this day (Luis Posada Carrilles).
March 30th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Actually at that stage in Chile regarding the NED, they did have a regime change policy.
March 30th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Leftside.. why dont u take a posting break> You’re beginning to bore the shit out of me.
I understand you dont read spanish very well so maybe there are some black holes in your latin american history.
The chilean plebisicite, for which the U.S. provided opposition funding, was PRESCISELY an intstrument of regime change. In Pinochet won he would remain put for 8 years, if he lost he would step down and open elections would be held. ZLet me tell you something, companero, that’s a LOT more regime change than anyone in Cuba dare propose short of being charged with subversion.
By the time of the Plebiscite, the US position was to oust Pinochet. On the nite of the vote, as results were coming in, Pinochet met with his junta and proposed suspending the count. He was blocked not only by Air Force General Matthei but also by direct intervention from the Reagan administration White House. Source: The Pinochet Files by the very leftist Peter Kornbluth.
Also while Jimmy Carter did not allow as many Chilean exiles into the U.S. as I would have preferred he did permit some dozens to come in. Among those few was someone who become my very best friend in L.A. — a founder of the Chilean guerrilla group MIR.
BTW.. you must be the last living person on earth who invests any credibility in those bloated self-serving slabs of official cuban state rhetoric you pass off as “news.” Wow.
The world works in funny ways and rarely conforms to the monohcromatic quasi-religious shema that fills the heads of zealots like Leftside. I see ur only 30….That’s good. There’s hope that you still have time to grow uo.
March 30th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Come on Randy, you are trying to tell me that Reagan had any where near kind of “regime change” policy vs Pinochet that corresponds to what we have vs. Castro today. I know there was pressure from the democrats in Congress by that point, which eventually resulted in some loans and credits being cut off (the NED money was congressional as well), but that is miles away from our policy to Cuba at any time since the Revolution. Get real.
March 30th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Lets settle this once and for all. Have the CBC invite Marc, Smith, Randy, and Leftside to debate Cuba on FOX!
What could be more fair and balanced!
March 30th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
I have not read Korblauh’s Chile book, but do trust his reasearch. I am quite sure those same Picochet files show the plebisite was conceived only as a way to extend Pinochet’s existence into forever. He never thought he’d lose. And the only reason the US backed it was so that Reagan would have more credibility in attacking the Communist block. To the chagrin of Chilean activists, the US did not back open elections, but rather Pinochet’s chosen path. And I don’t think the US was supporting and proving moral support to the Chilean Communist party (the main opposition) – in fact it denigrated them all the way through, giving Pinochet comfort. US insistence on a plebicite was important at that phase, but is in no way anywhere near what we can reasonably conceive of a “regime change” policy.
There was a constant struggle in the White House and Reagan was by no means on the democratization side, let alone “regime change.”
The hard-liners claimed to have President Reagan on their side, and they were probably right. Elliott Abrams himself acknowledges that on Chile, “the President’s instincts were not good,” meaning that Reagan continued to think of the Chilean leader as a loyal anticommunist friend who deserved U.S. support. In one White House meeting in late 1987 or early 1988, where Secretary of State Shultz raised a specific question about policy toward Pinochet, Reagan looked up at the mention of Pinochet’s name and said, “Pinochet saved Chile from communism, we should have him here on a state visit.” Everyone present was astonished at the idea; Shultz and his staff managed to bury it quietly.
BTW Marc, I just got a call that the Times is printing a letter to the editor I wrote regarding Colombia. I urge the Times to release the CIA documents implicating General Montoya in the escalating state-sponsored terrorism scandal. I hope you and your readers will join me in supporting our newspaper’s cooperation in the investigations in Bogota??
March 30th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
GOsh… It seems I wasted my time living through all these events in the flesh when all I really had to do was check in with the guy who has all the answers.. and in such neat air-tight, perfectly squared formulas. That’s ok. Either you learn to stasrt thinking more independently and creatively in the second half of ur life or u enter early brain death. Cool with me either way.
I see on you web profile that u list your employer as the “government.” I hope to hell ur not a teacher. Having a kid in ur class would be like sending him to Sunday School.
RLC.. Im naming u deputy. If u catch me replying to this automaton again, shoot me.
March 30th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
And the only reason the US backed it was so that Reagan would have more credibility in attacking the Communist block
Does it really matter? As far as getting rid of Pinochet went, I believed in any port in a storm.
I doubt if it did matter to the opposition to Pinochet. When someone has a boot on your neck, one isn’t choosy as to who helps lift it off.
March 30th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Marc,
I think it’s obvious what government leftside works for.
What I find so interesting is how much leftside is like Jeane Kirkpatrick. She supports dictators who share his ideology; he supports dictators who share his.
Farinha no mesmo saco.
March 30th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Lets settle this once and for all. Have the CBC invite Marc, Smith, Randy, and Leftside to debate Cuba on FOX!
It would be no contest. I routinely flush things better researched than leftside’s comments.
Don’t forget reg, by the way.
March 30th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Marc, you show a lot of interest in me personally, for someone so “bored” of me…
I already said what I did… under this post in fact. I have one of the decent socialis jobs in America, where I get paid to act in the public interest (though the wonders of capitalism make that nearly impossible).
BTW – what are those model, lucky Chileans so mad about (819 detained so far)? And why did US Homeland Security lock up an organizer with School of the Americas for 3 days last weekend?
March 30th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Marc, Randy, please remind me of one factual point I have been incorrect on. You all on the other hand….
March 30th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Two to a side Randy, have to be fair and balanced you know.
March 31st, 2007 at 9:41 am
Cuban have a perfectly good reason to try so hard to get to this country:
they have one leg up over the Mexicans, Haitians and others because of a
little-known bill which most people aren’t aware of called the Cuban
Adjustment Act, passed way back in 1966.
A hundred Haitian migrants made it to the shores of Southern Florida; they
reached land at Hallandale Beach on board a dilapidated sailboat. They
looked gaunt and exhausted and mostly dehydrated. One of them died in the
crossing.
According to The Miami Herald, it took the crammed sail boat at least three
weeks to make it to US shores, with its passengers seeking the famous
“American Dream.” http://www.miamiherald.com/457/story/57687.html
However, Haitians are not entitled to any “Adjustment Act”, like Cubans.
Shortly after their landing, they were interrogated by immigration
officials, and their most likely future will be deportation back to their
home country.
The treatment of citizens of the hemisphere’s poorest nation sharply
contrasts with the red carpet welcoming given to illegal Cuban migrants by
virtue of the Cuban Adjustment Act. When the Cubans reach US soil they are
given VIP treatment as long as they come out against the Cuban Revolution.
The ongoing debate in the United States over immigration legislation to
control illegal human trafficking from Mexico and Central America, and the
general discrimination immigrants face, does not in any way cover illegal
Cuban immigrants. The reason is the hatred of the Florida-based right wing
Cuban-American groups and a government from a country that for more than two
centuries has failed in its attempts to annex the island.
US authorities show little concern over the unscrupulous human traffickers
who smuggle people out of Cuba. Meanwhile, they are being quite expeditious
in building a wall along the Mexican border to prevent citizens from other
Latin American nations from sneaking into their territory.
March 31st, 2007 at 10:48 am
Yeah but Changito they’re refugees from the evil commies, don’t you see?
March 31st, 2007 at 1:04 pm
You let opinion masquerade as fact. To wit your slurs against Raúl Rivero alleging alcoholism. Your comments about the jailed dissidents alleging that they are US government agents because they have met with US government representatives and have received financial support from the US government.
Yours and jcummings support of the idea that sabotage can be conducted through mere words and not active acts of sabotage are your opinions, nothing more.
You selectively bring out facts such as “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” while ignoring my response that not one of them has modeled their government on Castro’s.
Color me unimpressed.
March 31st, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Apparently I’m being prevented from posting again, so Randy I posted a reply on your blog. Hope you don’t mind…
March 31st, 2007 at 4:59 pm
Ur not being prevented from anything except to continue making a fool of urself.
March 31st, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Don’t mind, but we’re quickly approaching this territory.
Talking about allegations of Raul Rivero’s homophobia, while ignoring El Jefe’s institutionalized homophobia – that existed for many years – is risible.
You can argue against the law, but only if you also support ending US meddling.
How very Stalinist of you.
The fact that none of the (recent) new left countries in LA have not turned their country into a replica of Cuba means nothing.
Perhaps to you, but I hasten to remind you of the old saying about opinions. The fact is that the leaders of Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina, all lived under military dictatorships, the last three having been jailed by said dictatorships, an experience you have had the luxury to have avoided. I’m sure that their experiences have completely soured them on the entire concept of dictatorships, so the only thing that means nothing (in my opinion; please note the qualification and consider using it sometimes).
Indeed it is even more risible that you have used Chavez as an example, especially in comparison to Argentina and Chile, two nations which have made a focused effort to diminish the role of the military in their nations while Chavez has gone on a weapons buying binge.
I oppose the embargo, I oppose the travel restrictions, I oppose TV Marti as a waste of money and due to allegations (another qualification), but I have no issue with Radio Marti provided that it’s run like VOA or Radio Free Europe. I know a lot of Eastern Europeans who when they think of the USA during the Cold War the first name that comes to mind is Willis Conover.
In short, I oppose much if not quite all of what my government’s policy is towards Cuba and I do oppose all of the major laws, including Helms-Burton. That being said, however, I see no basis for your extolling the virtues of Cuba while essentially ignoring the oppression and treatment of dissidents or otherwise smearing them and using the regime’s propaganda for your justifications.
Indeed, what I cannot abide is the notion that no one in the US can criticize Cuba’s government because of our government’s asinine policy. If that had been the case during the apartheid years, Nelson Mandela may have died in prison.
Spain’s Foreign Minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos is scheduled to visit Cuba on April 2 and according to an article I read in El Pais last week, he has plans to meet with dissidents as well. Please give me the opportunity to place you squarely in Cloud Cuckoo Land by your making a claim, for example, that Moratinos is a pawn of the Bush administration.
BTW, I have also had problems posting once in a while when I make too many hyperlinks in my posts. Others who post here on both the left and right have had the same problem. You’re not being singled out.
April 1st, 2007 at 11:46 am
A few relevant facts
Castro himself told Mankiewicz that on reflection, and in light of developments, he believes the Soviet Union’s position on the missiles was correct and his own mistaken.
Several U.S. companies tried and failed to get licences from OFAC to link Cuba to the Internet. One (Qwest?) gave up after more than a year and its public statement on the question can be found in the highlights section of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council.
Read some of the “independent journalists” — google “CubaPress” — and it will be clear these are not journalists or even 5th grade essayists. Name one valuable contribution to journalism any one of them has made, ever. Nobody can be paying them for this drivel, so what are they paid for?
Examples: in one Cuban town the street lights are so far apart that they constitute pools of light with shadows in between. This is the whole story. Another about a little girl wetting her pants in school ends “There are many unanswered questions about this incident.” That’s because nobody asked the questions, which this “journalist” doesn’t see as his responsibility. Any “independent” “journalist” in Cuba who displayed any competence turned out to be a Cuban G2 agent.
Some of the Cuban agents who were surfaced to testify at the trial of the 73 “dissidents” had been in place for decades. Obviously, Cuba had a long-standing policy of watching these groups and warning them if they approached the line between dissent and treason. Then something changed. Was it Cuban policy? Does nobody see the obvious: it was American policy that changed and the Cubans were not long in hearing about it.
Browse through FRUS X, in the State Dept. archives, the Kennedy admins anti-Cuban plots, for the role of the CIA, tasked with manufacturing “dissident” groups and the uses to which they were to be put. (Kennedy denied he had promised not to invade Cuba again, saying it had been conditional on the UN weapons inspectors certifying Cuba free of WMDs.)
Beatriz Roque, a self-styled economist who isn’t one (search for a single publication in her life in a peer-reviewed journal), is paid a fortune to campaign for the strengthening and extension of the blockade. In what country is this not treason?
April 1st, 2007 at 4:29 pm
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/orl-paolo0107apr01,0,4734714.story?coll=orl-opinion-headlines
OPINION & ANALYSIS
All or nothing on Cuba?
Flexibility, responsiveness should guide U.S. policy
Paolo Spadoni
Special to the Sentinel
April 1, 2007
U.S. policy toward Cuba in the post-Cold War era has always had little to do with Cuba and much to do with domestic politics.
Democracy or nothing.
This is, in essence, the current U.S. foreign-policy approach toward Cuba, first laid out in the early post-Cold War years when containment of communism was no longer an issue, and more recently stated by several high-level U.S. officials in the Bush administration.
Washington would be willing to lift the embargo and pursue re-engagement with Havana only if the latter were prepared to hold free and fair elections, respect human rights, release political prisoners, permit the creation of independent organizations, and embrace a market-oriented economic system. In other words, all Cuba has to change is everything it is today.
What are the chances that such a dramatic transformation will happen anytime soon?
Virtually zero.
But Cuba has not remained exactly the same over the past decade and a half. The Castro regime promoted some significant liberalizing economic reforms around the mid-1990s, and its attitude toward internal dissent has alternated between periods of harsh crackdowns to others of greater tolerance. And since Raul Castro became acting president last July, a debate has been taking place at different levels of Havana’s government over potential economic changes to the island’s socialist system. Last December, Raul even went so far as to propose negotiations with Washington for a normalization of relations.
Not surprisingly, the United States rejected the offer by reiterating that it will consider negotiations only when the Cuban regime opens democratically. Yet, for a country that has severed almost all ties with Cuba and has practically no leverage over developments on the island, putting forward the same rigid conditions for rapprochement that could never be met in the past is not a very effective approach.
Furthermore, U.S. policy toward Cuba in the post-Cold War era has always had little to do with Cuba and much to do with domestic politics. All major U.S. moves to intensify or relax economic sanctions against Havana have occurred in presidential election years, when partisan bidding for Cuban-American votes in Florida takes center stage.
Despite their initial opposition, George Bush and Bill Clinton strengthened the embargo by signing, respectively, the Cuban Democracy Act (or CDA) in October 1992 and the Helms-Burton law in March 1996. Bush changed his mind after Democratic opponent Clinton traveled to Miami in April 1992 and announced his endorsement of the CDA. Clinton had a similar volte-face four years later following the shooting down by Cuban forces of two Cuban exile planes over the Straits of Florida in February 1996.
Under pressure from U.S. farmer groups, Clinton cleared the way for the sale of U.S. food to Cuba in October 2000, but he was not up for re-election. In the meantime, Democratic nominee Al Gore tried to make inroads into the traditionally Republican Cuban-American base by vowing to resist any openings to the Castro government.
Finally, President Bush implemented new restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances to Cuba in June 2004 after a group of Cuban-American members of the Florida Legislature warned him that he could lose the support of the exile community if a tougher line against Castro had not been taken. That year, even Democratic contenders Howard Dean and John Kerry reversed their previous anti-embargo stance.
But there’s more. Washington’s alleged democratic commitment on Cuba often ended up rewarding Castro for bad actions and punishing him for more positive ones.
When Cuba halted its support for revolutionary forces in Africa and Latin America and its special relationship with the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, U.S. authorities tightened the embargo with the CDA. When Castro introduced capitalist-style measures in 1993 and 1994 and began to send timid signals to the U.S. for an improvement of bilateral ties, especially on migration issues, the United States reinforced its sanctions with Helms-Burton.
On the other hand, when Cuba’s economic reforms virtually came to a stop in the late 1990s, the U.S. lifted some restrictions on agricultural trade with Havana. In 2003, following the long-term imprisonment of 75 dissidents and the execution of three hijackers in Cuba, both the Senate and the House voted overwhelmingly to lift the travel ban to the island.
In order to influence Cuba’s future direction, Washington should adopt a more flexible policy that establishes realistic conditions for re-engagement, responds to changes in Cuba, and serves the interests of the United States, not those of domestic groups that are willing to pursue their narrow goals regardless of the behavior of the Castro government.
Otherwise, the current all-or-nothing approach on Cuba will likely continue to achieve just nothing.
Paolo Spadoni is a visiting assistant professor in the department of political science at Rollins College in Winter Park. He wrote this commentary for the Orlando Sentinel.
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April 1st, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Of course freedom under capitalism has a totally different meaning than the one you ascribe. State ownership of the media is preferable for many reasons, but must be independent as well. In Cuba the “freedom†of the press indeed varies, for mostly legitimate national security reasons (ie. US threats, Castro’s health).
Leftside, please don;t take this the wrong way, but are you sober as you write such filth? Do you even read your own posts? Assuming you’re not under the influence, one can at least take comfort in the fact that you’ve decided to lay aside any pretense, and come clean as an apologist and wholesale supporter of totalitarianism.
April 5th, 2007 at 9:51 am
Rafique, thank you for being mindful that I didn’t take that the wrong way. Appreciate that buddy.
But perhaps you are the one intoxicated as a reading of that line reveals nothing nothing of the sort you suggest.
I thought that paragraph was clear enough, but lets recap. I am in strong favor of state owned media, though perhaps I should clarify that means I support grass roots local and community media (who don’t have adequate funding under current arrangements and are dominated by local netwrok affiliates, which do us a great disservice). I then said the media must be editorially independent from the State, without qualification. Let me be clearer with my final sentance. I do not believe Cuba’s media organs today have that complete independence. There are many reasons for that, much of them understandable, having to do with my government’s history of intrusion on that island. For that reason I call on my own government to change its policy of regime change and material support ($$) of the opposition before I will criticize Cuba’s national security policies. You and everyone else can call it apogizing for Cuba, but as a US citizen my responsbility is what this country can do to facilitate improvements in Cuba and around the world.
April 13th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
You really don’t think about an issue before you write about it, do you?
For these trials, Cuba surfaced G2 agents who had been in place for decades.
This tells us what Cuba has actually done during that long history of repression you refer to — she has WATCHED the dissidents.
Can I refer some of you guys to FRUS X?
This special history project in the late 90s declassified many, not all, of the documents of the Bay of Pigs invasion planning.
The recruitment and use of “dissidents” and CIA agents acting as “dissidents” is discussed with more wink, winks than you’d expect in a meeting intended to be top secret, but the plans are clear.
Many of the posters ask rhetorically “Who were these people?” They then go on to make up something, because they have no idea.
Some of them have appeared on European TV calling for Europe to join the blockade. If the Trading with the Enemy Act applies to Cuba, there is a state of war. Where throughout history has it not been treason to campaign for acts of war against one’s own country?
Not to mention — crimes against humanity.
If you want to evaluate whether the journalists are journalists, look at their stuff on Cubanet. Pathetic! The American librarians association has already investigated and determined that the “independent” librarians are not librarians. The books they lend that are not in Cuban libraries tend to the occult. Their real function is dissemination of pamphlets from the Interests Section.
Most of the “dissidents” are just running a scam. Either they do it for the money, or they do it to get priority consideration for immigration applications. Documentation has been leaked by U.S. agencies involved saying the “Human Rights groups” sell letters of recommendation and that it is very difficult to make a case that anyone will be persecuted.
April 13th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
By the way, is there a U.S. investigative journalist besides Greg Palast, the only journalist to dig up the big stories in the U.S. in the past few years?
Oh, wait a minute, he’s in exile. I forgot.
July 24th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
Eric…
you have a very nice blog and very informative article…
October 30th, 2007 at 11:23 am
Top Fashion Tips…
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…
March 18th, 2010 at 11:58 am
Very glad I dropped on your blog..This was just what I was looking for. Keep adding.