Humdinger in Havana
Having visited and reported from Cuba maybe a dozen times
over the years, I find the news coming out of Havana this past weekend to be no less than
remarkable.
For the first time in the 46 years since Fidel Castro has been in
power, a coalition of opposition dissidents were allowed to assemble publicly
for two days without disruption from the Cuban government.
More than a hundred
delegates from small, illegal groups dispersed around the country met in a
Havana backyard, denounced one party rule and elected a 36-member steering
committee.
In the past any such attempt was smashed with nightsticks and
handcuffs. Remember, in Cuba, as Fidel
warned sometime ago, you are "either with the Revolution or against the Revolution"
and only El Comandante-en-Jefe decides who's in and who's out (Hey, didn't
George W. Bush say more or less the same thing when he declared the Global War
on Terrorism?).
This time around, the Cuban State Security limited itself to
arresting and deporting some European politicians and reporters who came into
Cuba to observe the meeting.
That was pretty bad timing on Fidel's part. Next month the European
Union is slated to reconsider the diplomatic sanctions it imposed on Cuba after
the regime locked up more than 70 dissidents in a hard-edged clampdown a little
more than two years ago.
U.S. diplomatic representatives did attend the meeting
and the delegates listened to a tape-recorded greeting from that renown Freedom
Fighter, G.W. Bush. This, of course, is
the kiss of death in Cuba. And not just among Fidelistas. Some of the more
prominent dissident leaders, indeed, boycotted the weekend meeting precisely
because they felt it was too closely aligned with the U.S. and with the more frothy exiles in
Miami.
Ignored (when not scorned) by both the Right and the Left, there is a
tenuous current of democratic dissidents in both Miami and Havana who want no
part of either Castro or Bush. These folks should be the key players in Cuba's
inevitable post-Castro transition.
I have argued for some years now that the
longer Fidel clings to power, and the longer the democratic dissidents are
snubbed, the farther and harder to the right Cuba will fall after Castro. The
best way to guarantee that the next Cuban regime will be a mafia-dominated
dictatorship is to continue the current paradigm"”the absolutely stupid
polarization of Cuba's future as either pro or anti-Castro.
That the Neanderthal
Right should promote this thinking is perfectly logical. It's in their favor. But
why the continuing silence of most of the American Left on Castro? Why is it
left only to Nat Hentoff to speak out?
What does it tell us that a great civil
liberties lion like Nat is left to publish his op-ed piece in the Washington
Times? Why isn't it on the front page of some other magazines that I could
think of?
A number of high-profile European leftists publicly parted ways with Fidel after his last big round-up.
Still, much of the middle-class, guilt-ridden American Left continues to blindly focus the Cuba issue as solely an
American foreign policy question (effectively cutting 10 million Cubans out of
their considerations). Standing up to the Yankees is always amusing and often
quite the right thing to do"”but it shouldn't win dictators like Castro a moral
or political pass.
For those on the Left who say they desire some sort of just
society in Cuba in a post-Castro future, it's time to put up or shut up. Simply
apologizing for Castro, usually by repeating ad nauseum the old saw that we
as Americans have "no right to criticize" him, will no longer cut it. The choice
will only be Castro (who will eventually die) and the dead end Cuba finds itself in, or the worst of the Miami
wingnuts, unless that is, you help support and bolster a third, democratic
alternative.
May 22nd, 2005 at 11:20 pm
Marc - I agree wholeheartedly with your views of what would be best for Cubans, but I don’t really get your attack on “The Left” here (to the extent that such exists). Maybe it’s just the circles I move in, but I simply don’t come across all these defenders of Castro that you see everywhere. Of course, I see plenty of people who are *accused* by various right wing blowhards of sympathy for Castro for trying to describe Cuba today in all its dimensions rather than simply reciting “Castro is evil”. But I don’t see many who are blind to the fundamental ugliness of the regime and the effect it has had on Cuba - particularly the Cuban economy.
As for the absence of noisy attacks on the Cuban regime from the left, isn’t it this simple: political debate in America is only likely to have an effect on American policy. Therefore, people who want to actually effect change are going to address those things that are within American control. That means sanctions. Right wingers keep up a constant drumbeat of criticism not because it is virtuous or even educational, but because it advances their domestic political interest in maintaining sanctions. Those who think that the sanctions are wrong or counterproductive have no such motivation.
May 23rd, 2005 at 12:59 am
Why is every criticism of the left catalogued as an “attack?” cant one just criticize? It’s not what the left is saying… it’s what it is not saying. We fight pro-actively for Palestinian rights on the left, fo example. I want to know who is proactively fighting for the rights of the Cuban people in the U.S. Do u think it’s a good idea to leave that job to G BUsh? That’s what the left is currently doing.
May 23rd, 2005 at 2:27 am
If Marc Cooper was a Cuban in Cuba, he’d be the first one spitting of a missive to Granma about the “counter-revolutionaries in the pay of the Miami mafia.” Or, at best, he’d hedge his bets and say that “sure, Cuba needs to improve… but those gangsters are giving the ‘legitimate’ opposition a bad name!”
What Marc managed to leave out was that they broadcast a recorded greeting from none other than our dear Generalissimo GW Bush. It was played on the head of the US Special Interest Section Cason’s personal laptop.
Do I lie?
May 23rd, 2005 at 2:33 am
Duh! Cooper DID notice that Bush was there in spirit… he just didn’t care all that much.
May 23rd, 2005 at 4:36 am
“Why is every criticism of the left catalogued as an “attack?” cant one just criticize? ”
Fair question. Of course one can just criticize.
“I want to know who is proactively fighting for the rights of the Cuban people in the U.S.”
Well, in my view, the embargo and the aggressive posturing of the American right have actively assisted Castro to maintain his grip on power. It follows that I believe trying to convince Americans of the counter-productive nature of these actions is the best way to advance the prospects of freedom and democracy in Cuba.
In other words, I don’t accept that noisy denunciations of Castro and his regime are the most effective way to ameliorate the situation in Cuba. Nor do should you have to recite your disgust of Castro every time you wish to say something on the topic of the effectiveness of American policy.
May 23rd, 2005 at 7:03 am
When Fidel kicks the bucket, power will likely go to Raoul. He’s not much better, I’ve heard; maybe he’s worse. But every transition is an opportunity for change, and anyway, Raoul isn’t much younger, so he’ll be gone soon enough. After Raoul … well, who knows?
But, Marc, what I want to know is, what’s your theory behind supposing that the reaction will be ever further rightward for every added year Fidel is in power? I think if you look at transitions away from long-lived tyrants around the world, they’ve been all across the board, from dynastic succession in North Korea to the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany. It’s hard for me to believe that Cuba will go back to being a mere Batistastan when both Castros are in their graves. Give me a theory, or at least a highly parallel precedent.
May 23rd, 2005 at 7:50 am
How about this for a pipe dream/Cuba policy.
1. American leftists, along with European govts (and communist nutjobs) that have directly or indirectly supported/apologized for Castro announce that Fidel is a nothing more than a pathetic despot worthy of imprisonment or worse.
2. The American right announces that after 3(4) decades, the embargo on Cuba hasn’t worked and Castro is going to die in office. It is no longer worth it to appease former Batisita supporters and rightwing nutjobs in Miami.
3. The US State Dept. announces that it will be willing to negotiate an end to the embargo if Castro will allow dissidents to form opposition parties and meet, without police harrassment, whenever and whereever they want.
Frydek-Mistek
May 23rd, 2005 at 9:22 am
Actually, Bush was there. The dissidents played a video message from him on their laptop for the group. I’m sure that has something to do with the left ignoring this momentous meeting. Yes, Marc, they are leaving it to the Bushies. Again, they ignore everyday politics for some dreamy futuristic ideal.
You can go to Stefania’s site and see more pics, if you’d like. Just keep scrolling down.
http://freethoughts.splinder.com/
Warning: many of the pics show dissidents who are openly pro-American.
May 23rd, 2005 at 9:57 am
Marc Cooper asks, “But why the continuing silence of most of the American Left on Castro? Why is it left only to Nat Hentoff to speak out? What does it tell us that a great civil liberties lion like Nat is left to publish his op-ed piece in the Washington Times?”
Well, the answer should be obvious to anybody who is not drunk on anti-Communist ideology. Nat Hentoff has absolutely no leftist credentials. He uses his Village Voice column to slander the Mideast Languages and Culture Department at Columbia University as anti-Semitic. He argues vociferously against a woman’s right to an abortion. He has even come to the aid of George W. Bush’s dreadful federal court nominees lately. In other words, Hentoff belongs exactly to the reactionary swamp epitomized by Reverend Moon’s Washington Times. It is sad that Marc Cooper cannot discern this, further proof of his steady march to Hitchensville.
May 23rd, 2005 at 10:10 am
Marc - Didn’t just about every notable member of that very large (!) and enormously influential (!) group, the Fairly-Far-Left, publicly condemn Castro’s trials of dissidents a few years back ? I know that Hentoff wrote of a bizarre brouhaha at The American Library Association - which apparently has a faction on it’s executive board who blocked expressions of solidarity with dissident Cuban librarians. But who even on the isolated and mostly irrelevant Fairly-Far-Left - the Chomskyites and such - doesn’t share your view ? And, although I’ve occasionally read some bizarre comments after meeting Fidel Castro from individuals on the trendy cultural left, I haven’t seen a defense of Castro among left liberals for many a decade. (For me personally, Fidel lost any luster after he supported the Soviet invasion of Chechoslovakia nearly forty years ago.)
I think you’re overstating here…to the point of distortion. Maybe Alexander Cockburn would fit your profile of “the left” refusing to criticize Castro, and you could find a few politically marginal morons with cultural credentials like Alice Walker who profess great admiration for Fidel, but I don’t know of anyone who’s taken seriously in left-liberal circles who doesn’t look forward to Castro’s demise and hope it opens up new political space, much as we prayed for the death of Arafat.
How do we draw these lines in using the term “left” in the U.S., where Hillary Clinton is attacked as a “leftist” in some fairly prominent salons of the right ??? I guess the issue of definition and perception is part of my problem with your post…Pop quiz for conservative posters here - who is Stanley Aronowitz ? Mike Davis ? Michael Albert ? Name a book published by Verso Press. Which Trotskyist organization was Christopher Hitchens a member of? Anybody who can’t answer at least a couple of those questions probably thinks of Ted Kennedy is a Leftist, so most of the terms of your discussion are shifted immediately into the realm of the irrelevant and arcane and the charges of “leftist” support for Castro become bizarre and essentially counter-factual.
As for Bush’s tape recording, that’s a stupid stunt that obviously hands propaganda points to Castro - who is still apparently fairly credible in Cuba because of his great abilities as a demagogue and the Cubans’ having, despite a disastrous inability to construct a modern economy, created a floor for the poor - an achievement which looks pretty good when you simply compare it to the millions tossed into gutters elsewhere in what used to be termed the Third World. It appears, based on your report, that the U.S. has actually managed to create a fracture within the democratic movement in Cuba. The dissidents should have sent a tape-recording back to Bush asking him to lift the futile, counter-productive embargo. Now the response to that would have been interesting. This embargo is one of those cul-de-sacs created throughout the history of American diplomacy by the mindless rhetoric and political opportunism of the right, by which only a Nixon could go to China without being redbaited. Politically, Bush could end the embargo…but then he’s not got the intellectual sophistication, the grasp of diplomacy nor the strength of character that Nixon had, so we’re not likely to see it.
(Marc…I’m afraid that the growing evidence of Nixon nostalgia among liberals proves just how far removed we are from the days when Fidelismo was percieved as a viable strain among American “leftists”.)
May 23rd, 2005 at 10:31 am
“But why the continuing silence of most of the American Left on Castro? Why is it left only to Nat Hentoff to speak out?”
It isn’t. Read NEW POLITICS or AGAINST THE CURRENT or NEWS & LETTERS or any anarchist publication and you’ll find no shortage of criticism of Castro.
May 23rd, 2005 at 12:18 pm
Fidel might not die — Cuba has invested a lot in biotech (an issue that surfaced briefly during the Bolton fiasco).
YES, I’m joking. Jeez. You’ll know I’m serious when I start gibbering about decapitating Jim Rockford.
May 23rd, 2005 at 12:26 pm
Wanted: Investors to help finance an animatronics research lab in small Caribbean country. Must be willing to relocate to avoid capitalist lackey lawyers with big ears…
May 23rd, 2005 at 12:46 pm
“The choice will only be Castro (who will eventually die) and the dead end Cuba finds itself in, or the worst of the Miami wingnuts, unless that is, you help support and bolster a third, democratic alternative.”
Marc…might I add that you rather remarkably skip over the main issue of agency in determining Cuba’s future when Fidel passes - the Cuban people. The American Left - whatever that might mean to you - has hardly been the key to continuation of Castro’s regime and they will hardly be the determinant factor in what comes after. Liberals have been pretty firmly opposed to the economic boycott and travel restrictions for many years (despite typical Clintonian caving to the Republicans). I just don’t see how Chomsky’s legions are going to make much difference one way or the other. The biggest danger to Cuba’s future is that after Castro’s demise the right-wing will push not for reform, democratization and shifting gears toward a modern entrepeneurial economy, but for maximalist market domination of all aspects of Cuba’s economy and society and the imposition of a pliant government heavily influenced by exiles . That is an extreme scenario and would probably mean something approximating a civil war, cueing direct U.S. intervention, but it’s pretty obviously the fantasy harbored by many in Miami and their allies in the Beltway Ideology Factories. Whatever happens, it won’t be according to a blueprint put forward by The Left.
Democratically-minded folks around the world should be speaking out on human rights in Cuba as elsewhere, but it’s not up to us to come up with a post-Castro strategy for Cuban reform. That’s precisely the kind of hubris that makes the neo-cons so dangerous, delusional and, ironically, the inept heirs of the time-worn Leftist “solidarity” bullshit - a scenario in which Americans of extreme ideological bent and little more than academic, ivory tower credentials assume that they have the formula for global liberation and - rather than simply and responsibly asserting the limitations of our military power, the potential benefits of trade and economic interdependence and, thus, proposing a humane, rational, even-handed U.S. foreign policy combined with judicious use of foriegn aid and economic incentives - they begin designating their allies-in-exile, forming internationalist cabals for overthrowing governments and sending material aid to various and sundry militant factions they’ve deemed their comrades. All in an effort to exert their own will as righteous agents of the wretched of the Earth and the unjustly oppressed in a global “revolution”. Generally a prelude to some combination of disaster and disappointment…and at best a diversion from making sure that our own house is in order when we’re dealing with tough issues abroad. Many eggs are broken - according to the Leninist maxim - but the omelettes never seem to turn out to be as palatable as promised (Bahgdad being the current case in point).
All decent, sensible Americans support human rights and greater democracy in Cuba, but the rightwing agenda is currently the primary external impediment to Cuban liberalization, insofar as the U.S. has any direct influence on the process. If the Cold War taught us anything, it is that isolating populations culturally and economically makes absolutely no sense except to the most insecure Stalinists and crackpot Rightists. Handing Castro an opportunity to appear to be a proponent of greater openness toward the U.S. in this particular pissing contest is disgraceful and a measure of just how patently absurd the Boltonesque approach to Cuba of this administration and their hard-right ideologues has become.
May 23rd, 2005 at 2:16 pm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3702431.stm
An inside, anti-Castro view on Bush’s policies…
May 23rd, 2005 at 4:16 pm
reg, you rock.
Marc, if you have any concrete suggestions for U.S. citizens who would like to support democratic dissidents with positive actions (i.e., not more ritual denunciations of Fidel), please make them. You were there, you talked with them; what would be useful?
May 23rd, 2005 at 5:08 pm
Truly great subject — Castro……
For me at least, I have the most romantic viewpoint from the distant past - and hard reality for the current now — did not read any of the links that you showed — because my views are so strong, for many years now…..
Castro in basic terms for me is a dinasour, a lovely one from my Anarchistic days — because of my great love affair with Che and the “Revolution”…..idealogy at it’s best in the 60s…..
Leaping forward several decades and cutting to the chase…..When Russia dropped Cuba and it was over, the support…it was over for any serious conversation…..
In fact, Fidel always wanted and courted the US… and oddly enough his great love of baseball, of all things not political…but back to the serious…
We NEVER gave up the sanctions to Cuba, idiotic by my take…in a large way, for such a small place…Cuba…I have found it all idiotic…you can swim from Key West to Cuba in short time…only 90 miles away…and all that portends.
I would not guess what will happen when Fidel is gone — I will miss his glamour/angst and postions as a “young man”…those were great days, and great times for me in my own idealogy for then…….
I will never miss Castros inability the past couple of decades to come up to speed, nor will I ever miss our country, the good old US of A to be real about Cuba and make serious and honest attempts to take this tiny Island with a man of Great Ego and solve what I always believed had very simple solutions, had we truly tried……
May 23rd, 2005 at 5:42 pm
Kudos on the comparison with Bush. I mean that’s the way dictators work. I don’t get the ongoing embargo. Open up trade and bury the place in commerce. Hemingway would cheer the effort. Jimmy Carter advocates this approach and so do I.
May 23rd, 2005 at 6:05 pm
Mary — I can’t speak to Hentoff outside the Columbia issue, but the coverage there suggests a large and fairly widespread anti-Semitism problem there in the Middle East Dept. that Jewish and Israeli students have complained about. In that he’s objectively right (the poison in the Middle East generally is not to be believed; such things as publishing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the PA website, Abu Mazen’s Holocaust denial, “Zahra’s Blue Eyes,” or the recent Friday Sermon on PA-TV calling “the jews” a world-wide virus to be eliminated etc). It’s not surprising that that Arab professors from foreign countries are poisoned by this, considering the ugly state of their home societies. Denying that is like saying the South didn’t have a KKK problem in the sixties. Hentoff may or may not be wrong on everything else (I don’t know much about him) but he’s objectively right about that.
Fighting for Palestinian rights? Gimme a break. They are a bunch of nasty, horrible terrorists who pioneered the Beslan and 9/11 massacres (Maalot and Lod airport anyone) who won’t take “yes” for answer in delusions of destroying Israel. Just another bunch of Hard Boy thugs like Charles Taylor or Msgt. Samuel K. Doe who’s only expertise is killing people. I KNOW the Left generally gets a delicious frisson of delight whenever they bump up against pseudo-marxists hard core killers but give me a break. Moral equivalence is the road to Castro and Pinochet.
The real road to Democracy (and I think Marc is right here) is to criticize Bush and those supporting Castro. Bush can and should and MUST be pressed to bring Posada to justice for killing innocent civilians to demonstrate the US’s commitment to justice. He’s a terrorist, and should be turned over to Venezuela or Cuba even though those countries are nasty dictatorships and it will piss off the Miami exiles. Terrorism trumps EVERYTHING as 9/11 should damn well have taught us. At the same time, guys like Oliver Stone, PEN, Chris Dodd, etc need to be taken to task for supporting a thug (not the worst but he’s still a thug) who throws librarians and poets in jail.
Marc is absolutely right in that Castro, and whoever comes after him through the military complex, will be seen as a total failure, with a turn towards the hard-right. What Castro has done has been to create a Napoleonic dependency, a new Party-led aristocracy (and an alliance with Chavez, oil for a mercenary army) that by it’s very nature excludes from opportunity anyone who isn’t the insider. As Europeans put up hotels, have tourists come in droves, etc. the argument that Castro put forward (the country is a basket case because of the US embargo) looks as self-serving as it is, since other foreigners come there and spend money, yet the country is still miserable and all the wealth goes to Castro and his cronies (ala Pinochet). Castro is just a kinder, gentler Saddam. With everyone inside the island in jail or completely marginalized only the Exiles who end up supporting large extended families on the island will have the economic and thus political power to effect a new government when the military finally gets tired of Fidel’s less able successors. People inside Cuba are likely to see the Exiles as more inclusive than whatever “Castro-lite” alternative exists (largely based on Party cronyism).
Actual experience proves Reg wrong. Unlike Reg I’ve lived in Beijing (for four miserable sweaty months). From first hand experience I can say that trade ties and economic development are completely compatible with one of the most repressive police state regimes on earth. Trade ties would of course benefit both US farmers (mostly agribusiness) and Castro himself (skimming off the top ala Saddam) but would do about as much for political liberalization as a Guangdong sweatshop employing children to make your cheap Nikes. Extensive EU trade with Castro has produced nothing in the way of political freedom or even individual space for people to live their lives. Castro represses Gay Rights activists like crazy, to pick one example (though one that Leftists ignore).
Susan (though not the way she intended I’m sure) hit the nail on the head. Castro is a nostalgia “brand”; the reality is he’s a somewhat more efficient and thus less brutal Pinochet but that’s what he is. Che in any terms must be considered a total failure. Not only did he get his ass killed in a stupid attempt to revolutionize countries that didn’t want it (and provoke repression of legit reformers who actually did something); he offered only a brutal Stalin-esque gulag in return. Che in the idealized Movie was supplanted by the guy who personally conducted executions of “counter-revolutionaries” who were former comrades who would not reject constitutional democracy, a child in his unit who had stolen food, a peasant suspected of being an informer, and more. Guevara praised the “extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless, and cold killing machines.” Reality is that Che and Castro both are and were brutal thugs who imposed a profoundly illiberal and fascist regime in the search for social perfection rather than the messy liberalism of personal freedom, liberty, and imperfect justice based on laws not men.
This is what confronts Cuba today. Enabled by rosy romantics who have that frisson of delight when thinking about the hard boys with guns who (gasp!) kill people.
May 23rd, 2005 at 6:33 pm
Ah Jim, but in terms of Castro being a “nostalgia brand” — it is what I meant totally in terms of the very current “now” — there we agree in toto…about Pinochet, interesting you would run them together, one being a revolutionary and the other being planted by the US to rid Allende…………………
About Che and your lengthy thoughts about him…do not agree on many levels…but another topic for another day…in the main, either because we differ entirely from those times, or entirely on a intellectual level, then too perhaps I am far older than you — I lived through those times, you did not…or just again, I am far wiser than you……large smiles here…..
May 23rd, 2005 at 7:10 pm
Apparently Rockford thinks that the Chinese people would be farther along in their considerable, albeit uneven, progress out of the maoist nightmare had Nixon stayed home and we’d just continued to embargo the place.
May 23rd, 2005 at 7:42 pm
Susan…giving up Che’s ghost makes you a better person. I know it’s an awful lot like a Catholic giving up those prayers to The Blessed Virgin, but it’s a lot healthier than clinging to a false icon. Che was a brutal, stalinist sonofabitch, albeit a brutal, stalinist sonofabitch with balls and considerable charisma. Like Mao, he started out as a talented young guy with quite a few admirable qualities whose revolutionary zeal ultimately turned into dogmatic monomania - his steady immersion in bankrupt ideology totally undermined what was obviously a humanistic impulse when he was first drawn to revolution. The anecdote that made me finally realize just how shockingly and totally fucked both Che and Fidel were from even the early days of the revolution was their response during the Cuban Missile Crisis. They would have, by Castro’s own admission, chosen nuclear war over standing down. Here’s Robert MacNamara’s account of his discussions with Castro at a “survivors” symposium on the missile crisis held in Havana a few years ago. This was an open forum and Castro hasn’t denied MacNamara’s account:
I turned to Castro and I said, “Mr. President, I have three questions: Number one, did you know the warheads were there? Number two, if you did, would you have recommended they be used? Number three, if they were used, what would have happened?”
He said, “Bob, I did know they were there. I would not have recommended, I did recommend they were to be used, as you said. What would have happened to Cuba? It would have been totally destroyed.” (end clip)
That’s a scary guy. Fidel was basically in the same mad-bomber camp as Gen. Curtis LeMay, while both Kruschev and Kennedy were trying to negotiate a way back from the brink of Armageddon. Che was the guy who went to Moscow to appeal for the nuclear missiles in the first place.
May 23rd, 2005 at 7:45 pm
“Actual experience proves Reg wrong. Unlike Reg I’ve lived in Beijing (for four miserable sweaty months). From first hand experience I can say that trade ties and economic development are completely compatible with one of the most repressive police state regimes on earth.”
That’s just frigging nuts. The difference between the freedom that individuals have now compared to, say, 1976, when economic liberalization began is massive. Of course it’s still politically repressive, but normal people live most of their lives outside of the political sphere, and the state has generally retreated across the board.
“Fighting for Palestinian rights? Gimme a break. They are a bunch of nasty, horrible terrorists who pioneered the Beslan and 9/11 massacres (Maalot and Lod airport anyone) who won’t take “yes” for answer in delusions of destroying Israel. ”
All of them?
May 23rd, 2005 at 8:07 pm
Marc, I think that you’ll agree that Eric Umansky and I have been strongly critical of Castro. Christ, I’ve been writing favorably about the dissidents as long as I’ve had a blog.
Yes the kooky left and the ALA still embrace Castro, but most of the rest of us (including your Nation colleague Eric Alterman) don’t, unless one finds Bill O’Reilly credible. Susan Sontag criticized Garcia Marquez for not speaking out on behalf of the dissidents.
It may also be worthwhile to remember this 16 year old letter to Castro: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/4150
How about a little of that high dudgeon for Yvon Neptune?
May 23rd, 2005 at 8:52 pm
marc - since much of what I wrote could be interpreted as quibbling or quarreling with your post, let me say that had you not posted this, I wouldn’t know about it. I didn’t see it in my scan of weekend papers - but more to the point, I didn’t see any mention of it on The Nation, New Republic or American Prospect websites or any of the liberal blogs I read. Further, I didn’t see any mention of it at the Weekly Standard website, which like the others mentioned includes daily posts, as well as the weekly content. It’s an important story and one that no particular political faction should own. We are obsessed with Iraq, the “nuclear option”, and other stories that have more currency than Cuba right now, but it’s a damn shame that so little attention is being paid to this by damn near everybody.
(The American Conservative doesn’t do daily updates, so they can be forgiven for not having anything up on this, but in making my rounds of daily digital discourse, it turns out that two of my Quasi-Comrade Pat’s big stories this week are on the mistreatment of edible animals on factory farms and why conservatives should oppose the excesses of the meat industry, and the common social conservative cause with ultra-feminist Andrea Dworkin on…whatever. “Post-modern” politics is fascinating, if not very satisfying.)
May 23rd, 2005 at 9:14 pm
Oh shit…put up a post on what chickenshit bastards the Democrats are. I know…I am one…but this Senate “compromise” is pure bullshit. The nomination of Rogers Brown, at the very least, should be fought. Even if it’s a losing fight. Bigots do not belong on the federal bench…
This woman was the ONLY member of the California Supreme Court to vote against gay adoption rights. She no more belongs on the federal bench than a racist who invokes the Constitution or legal precedent against interracial adoption or interracial marriage. Contrary to what flagrant, flaming lunatics like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh claim, we oppose this woman because she is a goddamned bigot, not because she is black. Farrakhan is black, and that doesn’t make his reactionary politics or crackpot ethnocentrism any more palatable. The fact that Brown’s black makes her bigotry more obscene, if one wants to psychologize it, but bigotry is bigotry. Black folk don’t get a free pass, no matter what the radical right would have us believe about their designated, phony, hand-picked “good” African-Americans. Affirmative action at it’s worst and most blatantly offensive…
May 23rd, 2005 at 9:22 pm
Reg — so very well said to me!…but hell it is hard to give up the charasmatic eh?…but did in fact realize that too years ago…was just not wanting to quibble with Jim on a few old points from the past, the dead past…but those times were fun, and a tad of mescaline or peyote did help then too…and I say that with great humour, as that was a part of those times along with our very stoned and great political conversations, when we all thought we knew and owned the world!
Good post to me…thanks!
May 23rd, 2005 at 9:42 pm
“a tad of mescaline or peyote” ???
All I can say, Susan, is you were obviously Present At The Creation…that aside invokes memories of Austin Texas, 1965 - where peyote was still legal and mescaline was being produced rather prodigiously in the U of T chem labs…well before “Hippy” and “Haight Ashbury” hit Life Magazine.
May 23rd, 2005 at 11:10 pm
Reg
Meaning as we digress entirely off topic,…
You were in fact at the chem lab at UT and knew the formula???…PRODUCED IT?…do e-mail me the recipe…LOL!…..
Marc is gonna kill us I think, for these comments, but then he has great humour and feel he will not delete us…..oh BTW, I also loved Hashish, probably my most favorite…..
Ok next post will be back to politics and off the drug topic…….maybe……ahahaha….
Seriously have a good evening guy….time for me to go offline for the night!…enjoyed our posts this evening…….
May 24th, 2005 at 2:11 am
Reg, I’m a little confused about the context of that exchange between MacNamara and Castro. There is a context I am clear about: the U.S. had moved missiles into Turkey (and removed them in deal that required removing the Cuba-based missiles first.)
Was Castro talking about a Soviet first strike or retaliation for a first strike from the U.S.? As for Castro apparently being willing to see Cuba (and himself) hit with nukes, a US/USSR thermonuclear exchange would have meant a long, slow, painful death for Cuba no matter what. By making Cuba a strategic target, Castro might have only have been making the hypothetical best of the worst possible hypothetical situation.
This is all, of course, MAD, quite MAD, I tell you. But that was just life in the big city, back then. As bad as Castro was and is, I doubt he wanted to die so young, while going down in history as a hired gun in an unparalleled global catastrophe.
May 24th, 2005 at 6:01 am
Michael, I’ve seen somewhere McNamara recounting that exchange, too. It’s hard to believe, but it’s also hard to imagine what Castro stands to gain from making it up (unless he still thinks that he’s safer if the U.S. government thinks he’s an unpredicatable madman - hey, it worked for Nixon, for a while).
I hadn’t heard the part about Che going to the USSR to request the missiles though. Reg - is that something that’s well known?
Anyway - its good to see you here, Michael. I kind of miss tag-teaming in the comment boxes at Alden Pyle’s, before we both got banned!
May 24th, 2005 at 6:49 am
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/february01/thirteendays6.html
Here’s a link that gives a fuller version of the same anecdote by McNamara.
The context of Castro’s response was, so far as I understand it, in the event not of a U.S. thermonuclear attack but if the U.S. had acted militarily to remove the missiles by conventional means. Since this would have been, in effect, an invasion of Cuba and would not likely have stopped with removing missiles, he arguably wasn’t much crazier than the superpowers who banked on essentially the same threat. But I found the idea of Castro (and I’ve read elsewhere, unsurprisingly, that Che was as hardline on this, if not more) counseling Kruschev not to back down and to launch a nuclear attack if the U.S. moved against Cuba chilling.
Regarding the chemistry question, I had only the most fleeting brush with any classrooms at all, much less the chemistry lab…but I knew a guy. Everybody knew a guy. It was possible, however, for anybody to buy the cactus at a local garden store and mix it into milk shakes if you didn’t mind a bit of nausea. (There was damn near an entire Eagle Scout troop wandering around looking like extras from “Deadwood” that had crossed over to “the other side” after their eager explorations of Indian culture got the best of them.)
May 24th, 2005 at 7:06 am
Che negotiating for the missiles is in the Castaneda biography, but I’ve seen it referred to other places as well.
The Chinese were, of course, derisive of Kruschev for backing down as well.
May 24th, 2005 at 7:12 am
Ah, here’s some context, from John Lee Anderson’s biography of Che Guevara.
At the moment of maximum tension — after a Russian SAM (surface-to-air missile) brought down an American U-2 spyplane, killing its pilot — Fidel cabled Khrushchev, telling him he expected Moscow to launch its missiles first in the event of an American ground invasion; he and the Cuban people, he assured him, were ready to die fighting. Only a day later, Fidel learned that Khrushchev had made a deal with JFK behind his back — offering to pull the missiles in exchange for a promise not to invade Cuba and a withdrawal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Fidel was incredulous and furious that the deal was made behind his back, and reportedly smashed a mirror with his fist when he was told. Che tersely ordered his troops to sever his command post’s communications line with the adjacent Soviet missile base, and raced off to Havana to see Fidel…. In an interview with Che a few weeks after the crisis, Sam Russell, a British correspondent for the socialist Daily Worker, found Guevara still fuming over the Soviet betrayal. Alternately puffing a cigar and taking blasts on his asthma inhaler, Guevara told Russell that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off.
—-
Hmm, an intemperate comment by a young, brash, naive revolutionary, or official Cuban foreign policy from the horse’s mouth? I still haven’t found that Holy Grail for settling such questions: the direct quote in context. Did Che mean “would have fired them off” even if Cuba *hadn’t* seen a U.S. marines coming over the horizon? In any case, the decision was never in their hands, and Fidel and Che might have blustered and bluffed in different (and less apocalyptic) ways if it had been.
What is certainly a part of that context, in any case: Operation Peter Pan and the Bay of Pigs invasion, not to mention the general fear-mongering and saber rattling of the Cold War. Cooler heads prevailed, but not before I was treated to duck-and-cover training at a tender age. Pardon me for seeing a psychotic reptile like Curtis LeMay as more chilling by far than a firebrand like Che. (Hey, that rhymes! I should write an epic poem about the Cuban Missile Crisis!)
Mork writes: “Anyway - its good to see you here, Michael. I kind of miss tag-teaming in the comment boxes at Alden Pyle’s, before we both got banned!”
Now, be nice, Mork. Totten almost certainly has a conscience. Anyway he isn’t smart enough to be an Alden Pyle. Unless he’s being tongue-in-cheek (or keeping his ass covered on dangerous territory) when he says he now sees the Lebanese Phalange in a whole new light, a bunch of nice guys really, never mind those Nazi salutes ….
May 24th, 2005 at 7:57 am
“Alternately puffing a cigar and taking blasts on his asthma inhaler, Guevara told Russell that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off.” That’s the weirdest line I’ve seen yet in this discussion. I forgot that Che had asthma…
(McNamara has had interesting things to say about LeMay, who he worked for in WWII, as well.)
May 24th, 2005 at 9:24 am
My favorite recent Castro pronouncment was when he offered to send “election monitors” to Florida…
Considering how Bush (and Kerry) were dealing with Venezuela, we can see how important “democracy” is to them.
And just for the record, I don’t think Cooper quite gets how popular Castro is in Cuba, among young and old. There’s a reason Cuba didn’t go the Russian route. They survived the “special period” and are doing better than they have in decades. I also wouldn’t assume for a second that Raoul will take over. It’s much more likely that the same collective leadership running the country now will continue. Castro, by most accounts within Cuba, plays a largely symbolic role at this point. I know that doesn’t fit the model of all-powerful dictator, but for those of us who don’t get our talking points from the American government it always helps to check out facts on the ground.
Oh wait, the Democrats and Republicans have worked to make it ILLEGAL for me to even visit… When will Cuba learn the TRUE meaning of democracy: do what you are told.
May 24th, 2005 at 9:39 am
I would guess there are layers in the Cuban political leadership that may well surprise us as they come more to the fore once The Old Icon passes from the scene. Raoul, on the othr hand, seems like a total creep.
May 24th, 2005 at 10:36 am
Burningman, that’s quite a website you have there… hope y’all are compassionate when you seize power by arms!
As I noted, Ive been to Cuba many many times, so I know how popular and unpopular Fidel Casto is. His popularity has greatly eroded in the last 15 years as people see no way out. If you think Cubans live better than they have in “decades” well, then, you’re living on a different planet than I am. Cuvabs are doign better than they did in the early 90’s when collapse of the soviet subsidy drove the country to subsistence levels. Other than that, I recommend you spend a week in a real Cuban household and see what it’s like to really feed your family. I can tell you in advance: it’s 24/7 of dealing in the black market, weedling, negotiating, bartering etc to put basic food on the table. That sound like socialism to you? On the contrary, there are few places in the hemisphere other than Cuba where people have to spend so much of their lives having to deal in an unequal marketplace.
Whether or not the US admin is democratic or not, or restricts ur travel or not, tells us absoluteltly nothing about he quality of democracy or life in Cuba.
There is NO collective leadership in Cuba btw. Nobody believes that story. It’s Fidel’s show. When he dies, the deluge.
May 24th, 2005 at 11:09 am
Re: Nat Hentoff has absolutely no leftist credentials.
Oh BS. Wrote for Liberation, the anarcho-pacifist magazine. Contributing editor to The Progressive in the past. Wrote a biography of A.J. Muste, the libertarian socialist pacifist who was a neo-Trotskyist in the 30’s.
Cue to Mary saying Trots are counter-revolutionary?!
May 24th, 2005 at 11:23 am
“Neo-Trotskyist”? In the 1930s, there was no neo-anything.
May 24th, 2005 at 11:59 am
Muste was a “premature neo-Trotskyist”…
Hentoff has also been one of the best music writers in America. And he produced a fistful of Charlie Mingus albums.
A lot of his current opinions rub me the wrong way, but I’ll forever respect the guy.
May 24th, 2005 at 12:32 pm
You make two comments I have to take issue with, Marc, unless I misunderstood them:
1) “On the contrary, there are few places in the hemisphere other than Cuba where people have to spend so much of their lives having to deal in an unequal marketplace.”
Huh? I’ve lived in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, and know a little something about the abysmal economies in Haiti, Bolivia, to name a few of the unlucky ones. And I worked with Cuban immigrants for four years. Hatred of Castro and “communism” aside, the level of poverty to which they had been accustomed was nothing compared to that of the Guatemalan campesinos living on tortillas, chile, and frijol negro (only tortilla for a third of the year) in the deforested hills of Alta Verapaz (not to mention the military presence, and remnants of the “civil auto-defense patrols”). Let’s be careful to keep Cuba in proper perspective.
2) “Whether or not the US admin is democratic or not, or restricts ur travel or not, tells us absoluteltly nothing about he quality of democracy or life in Cuba.”
“Huh?” again. Say what is necessary about criticizing Castro’s repression of human freedoms, but I can’t for a moment naively pretend the U.S. embargo is neatly separate from Cuba’s ills. Fully responsible for them? Of course not. Unacceptably complicit with and aggravating of them? Absolutely.
May 24th, 2005 at 2:25 pm
Again:
Marc, if you have any concrete suggestions for U.S. citizens who would like to support democratic dissidents with positive actions (i.e., not more ritual denunciations of Fidel), please make them. You were there, you talked with them; what would be useful? What help do they say they would like?
Maybe you could make a Nation article of it, if you don’t think this is the right place to offer such suggestions.
May 24th, 2005 at 2:50 pm
So Michael Pugliese thinks that Nat Hentoff is a leftist because he wrote for Liberation long ago. How edifying. That would make David Horowitz a leftist because he used to write for Ramparts, and Christopher Hitchens another leftist because he used to write for the Nation. Har-har-har.
May 24th, 2005 at 5:31 pm
I don’t always agreee with Hentoff, but if you call someone a right-winger who so thoroughly reamed the Bush administration on Darfur here (http://villagevoice.com/news/0521,hentoff,64218,2.html) and has consistently savaged Bush on the Patriot Act, I hope you have someone help you get your shoes on in the morning.
May 24th, 2005 at 5:45 pm
So Hentoff wants the US military to open up another front in the Sudan. Big deal. That is not exactly what I consider leftism. My idea of leftism is Eugene V. Debs going to jail protesting WWI. On the Patriot Act, it is good that Hentoff criticizes it but so does Republican Congressman Ron Paul in Texas.
May 24th, 2005 at 6:03 pm
I guess if you choose to selectively read the article you might come away with that conclusion. The focus of the article was about the CIA’s ties with the Sudanese government and how that appears to have led to the Bush administration seeking to crush the Darfur Accountability Act.
Calling Bush “an accomplice in genocide’ is hardly a right-wing comment, unless one doesn’t know left from right.
May 24th, 2005 at 6:18 pm
The Christian right has been pushing for intervention in the Sudan for years. Nat Hentoff has been carrying their spears from the beginning. I really got a big laugh about his advocacy on behalf of some anti-slavery outfit in the USA that was raising money to buy the freedom of slaves in the Sudanese south. It turned out to be a scam run by the Christian militias. They’d take the money and spend it on weapons.
—
During early 1999, word of another type of fraud began to surface and circulate in exile and expatriate communities in Nairobi and elsewhere: fraud conducted by local Dinka authorities, including SPLA authorities. Most southerners aware of this said the same thing: slavery and “redemption†had become “a business†for the rebel group. Investigations by journalists with the Washington Post and the Irish Times have now confirmed these reports with eyewitness testimony confirming that some transactions for the freeing of slaves were effected not through Arab middlemen but through SPLA soldiers posing as Arab middlemen.
Press reports cite SPLA officials admitting that some of the children whose freedom was purchased were not slaves, and that at least one “middleman†was an SPLA officer in disguise. The SPLA official spokesperson said that the SPLA made quite a large sum of money from currency conversion alone.
full: http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/sudanupdate.htm
May 24th, 2005 at 7:25 pm
Still doesn’t make him a right-winger and it still didn’t address the issues he brought up in the article about the CIA working with the backers of the genocidaires.
May 24th, 2005 at 7:39 pm
Also, if you’re going to invoke Human Rights Watch, you ought to read this on Darfur: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/05/03/usint10575.htm
May 24th, 2005 at 9:20 pm
Guess what…”Left” and “Right” are shorthand. These are simplistic descriptions of a spectrum which often contains contradictory strains even at each end. For what it’s worth, in my view Hentoff has moved to the right on some key issues, but it’s not descriptive of him - at least not in a way that’s meaningful or interesting - to call him a rightist. He’s too much of a contrarian and too wedded to the values that originally drew him to the left for “rightwing” to make much sense. Hentoff is one of those odd birds, like Hitchens, for whom a random checklist of political stances and professed beliefs doesn’t make much sense unless one has some grasp of the personal trajectory, their sense of self, where they’ve been and what issues drove them in certain of their current directions.
Horowitz is rather a different sort - the classic left-wing apostate who changes sides the way some people change suits but who’s manichean worldview in which one political ideology represents Good and a conjured opposite represents Evil remains essentially untouched. There’s also a massive dose of self-hatred driving the whole messy business of radically rejecting one’s past - an emotion which, at least in the instance of Horowitz, may well be justified.
May 24th, 2005 at 9:32 pm
Humdinger in Havana
It could be much worse:…
May 24th, 2005 at 9:56 pm
“There’s also a massive dose of self-hatred driving the whole messy business of radically rejecting one’s past - an emotion which, at least in the instance of Horowitz, may well be justified.”
Zing!!!!!!!!!
May 25th, 2005 at 2:06 am
Blogs are interesting in the sense that when you’re hooked you’re really hooked, but forget about it for awhile and you really can’t be bothered. So having taking a peek here I just can’t can’t let Reg’s bullshit comment about the “political space” liberals wished for and Arafat pass. Reg those non extremist anti Cockburn, new republic reading liberals you trumphet so enthusisiastically, in your robust prose don’t care at all about palestinains in the main and in fact are as guilty as republicans in sanctioning and supporting the continued barbaric conditions of military occupation 3.5 million people endure in the west bank and gaza. This includes heroes of yours like Senator Wellstone all the way down. All of them know, presumably yourself included< konow that Palestine is the great taboo in Amercican politcs, and to even raise a fuss over the criminal policies we continue to sanctify is not worth it. So Palestinians endure the worst harships, settlements expand in the West Bank, violence continues unabbatted, Israel gets tge green light to do as it wishes, at best what is propossed for gaza is that it becomes a major source for cheap Israeli labor and liberals like reg yap about the political space they prayed for when arafat passsed. Now that’s solidarity for you
May 25th, 2005 at 8:05 am
I spent several months in a “real Cuban household.” Having received a basic political education from Maoists, who call Cuba “state capitalist,” and having been romantically involved with a Mariel-era emmigrant for several years, I didn’t show up in Cuba with high hopes of any kind. I did not go on a sponsored trip like Venceremos, but stayed in Centro Havana and walked around everyday for hours starting coversations, meeting hustlers, students, and regular people of all stripes.
I mainly went because no one speaks English and I thought it would be a good way to improve my Spanish. Plus, I love the Cubans I’ve met in the states: fun, smart, cynical and (cliche as it sounds) passionate. But the politics were most interesting.
Of those who hated Castro, of which I met more than a few, they mainly wanted to leave Cuba because they couldn’t conceive of a better option for the island itself. Many lived in apartments that were consfiscated from the gusanos and can see plainly that the US wants to subjugate them.
Sure they have to hustle. But there are no street children, no death squads, and far less indignities than I’ve seen in Mexico for example. I don’t know what it was like when they had Soviet subsidies, but by the time I went a few years back they had managed to weather the “special period,” had built community gardens in every open lot in Havana. They felt free to publically discuss the post-Castro situation. It was so far from being an repressive police state, it’s hard to describe.
One incident was particularly telling. I was getting drunk on the Malecon with a couple of friends from the university and a mini-riot broke out. Two women started smacking the shit out of each other and their friends got involved. Maybe a dozen people were fighting. Then the cops showed up. One of the women smacked the cop in the head. He looked stunned, and then said, “why did you do that? You have to stop fighting now.” She apologized and the fight petered out. No one was taken to jail. Try that in LA and see what happens.
Many of the people in my age range (20s) were pretty cynical. “Socialismo o Muerte?” they’d say. “We got both.” That said, virtually all were supportive of the basic aims of the revolution, did not want socialized land or basic industries altered and were often critical of the small capitalist reforms the government imposed. This was especially true about the dollar (now euro) economy. It forced the young to scrape for dollars, prostitute themselves and did not reward productive labor.
At the same time, I found the average Cuban to be “free” in a way the average US citizen is not. They knew their history, had personal dignity and did not live with the constant anxiety of homelessness and poverty common in the US and throughout Latin America. I have been beaten several times by the NYPD for attending non-violent political marches (from antiwar to support for public education). I don’t need to hear horror stories about “totalitarian” countries abroad to know what that looks like. The student group I was involved with here in New York dealt with state violence and infiltration. But I have yet to hear Nat Hentoff write about THAT.
I also spent quite a bit of time with a young Chilean woman who’s parents had received asylum after Pinochet’s goons had tortured them. She was a club kid from London, but still traveled back every summer to work there and “repay the debt” for the help Cuba gave them. Maybe she was a dupe, too. I stayed in another house where my friend’s father was killed fighting the South African army. Maybe his pride wasn’t misplaced either.
I suggest you spend a week in a poor Los Angeles family. It’s 24/7 hustling and weedling to put basic food on the table. It’s racist attacks on Mexicans who do most of the work in any case. It’s very real fear of the LAPD killing your son for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s “illegal” status so you can’t stand up for yourself, but can do the shit work. But that natural, right?
By the way: there is “collective leadership” in Cuba right now whether you can wrap your head around it or now. Castro is very old and according to word on the street (among many, many people) has not been managing the state since the mid-to-late 1990s. A junta isn’t necessarily more “democratic” than (the myth of) the one-man dictatorship, but it’s worth noting when it happens. This is all the more true since Castro could die any time now.
But arguing with you is silly. I doubt you’ll be satisfied until Cuba is as democratic as Haiti or the Dominican Republic, where the people live in dignity with a bounty of material goods and social power. And where they make sure to use the profits of their economy to ensure housing, medical care and education. Unlike Cuba, right?
By “democracy” you mean the political and social rule of the middle classes. Some of us think that is not the most important measure. That’s why the same people who hate Cuba hate the very democratically elected Chavez. Because it’s all about the middle classes for people like you. If the poor eat shit forever, you’ll be fine as long as your liberal buddies get administration jobs.
(And, the only thing less likely than communism to come to power in the USA is your brand of liberalism. No chance. Zero. And even if it did, the compassion they showed last time around was Hiroshima, a love for Batista and the napalming of Vietnam. If we’re keeping a compassion index…)
May 25th, 2005 at 9:41 am
Ahmed…The New Republic liberals are guilty as charged. I didn’t invoke them in that comment. As for Arafat, he was an ipediment to peace, although obviuously not the only impediment. I can’t change the objective conditions faced by Palestinians - including the degree to which Zionism is a “third rail” in American politics - but that’s no excuse for their succumbing to some pretty lousy leadership that ranged from cynical and corrupt to sincerely crackpot and insanely counterproductive. Well, maybe it’s an excuse…but excuses don’t matter much.
As for most liberals I actually talk to, they tend to be sick of the whole situation but have no sympathy for the Likudniks - here or there - and want to see an end to Israeli occupation and a Palestinian state built on compromise. Would that compromise be the ultimate historic justice for Palestinians ? No…but it’s what they can more than likely get if they are politically judicious.
As for most liberal publications I read, I consider The New Republic editors mostly beyond the pale when discussing this - but The Nation is very good on the issue and is, ironically, more representative of liberal thinking that isn’t tied to time-worn dogmas of the more sectarian East Coast social-democrats. Once you get out of some fairly cloistered , elite circles, pragmatism, fairness and compromise constitute, in fact, most ground-level liberal thinking about Israel vs. Palestine. The Jewish community is a special case, but frankly I don’t think that the East Coast hierarchy speak for a Jewish community that’s firmly united behind them. Most Jewish liberals are, at the very least, conflicted about Israeli policies and contemptuous of Sharon. Among liberal journals, I’ve found The New York Review of Books to be a pretty good source for some investigations of the recent history that seems objective, informative and beyond the boundaries of conventional wisdom (i.e. prejudice and distortions) you get from, for instance, The New York Times.
Among the liberal political class, Zionism is definitely something of a third-rail but there are American politicians who push for fairness and breaking the impasse. Do any of them push hard enough to set tough conditions for American aid to Israel. I doubt it. At least I can’t give you a list of names. I don’t know what Paul Wellstone’s position was on this, but it’s hard to imagine that he supported the Israeli occupation. I thought Clinton did a fairly good job of pushing for a negotiated settlement. I don’t think he can be held accountable for the failure, but I’m no expert. I’ve read various accounts of why “the peace process” broke down, but my own view is that without, at a minimum, the Israelis withdrawing the settlements, the question of the good faith of the Palestinians in making further progress is moot. The Israelis should have taken that step decisively.
Personally, I believe that the Zionist project has turned into an objective disaster for all concerned and was rooted fundamentally in a vision that was, at best, blindered and at worst, ruthlessly ethnocentric and unjust. That’s probably a minority view among liberals, although I’d bet it’s more common now than when Israel still maintained it’s old image as the promised land of the kibbutz and the Labor Party. That image is dead. For anyone who’s not an ideologue, it should be clear that the clock can’t be turned back for anybody. Nor is the “logical” leftist solution of a bi-national, democratic state a possibility at this point - given the hyper-nationalist passions, the fervid religious nonsense and contempt for “the other” that are imbedded in both sides for the foreseeable future. A viable Palestinian state carved out of the occupied territories is the “solution”, albeit not what people of goodwill should assume is the final solution, if you’ll pardon the expression. Over time, the people on both sides can do better.
Demographics favor the Palestinians and there is, in my view, more cultural compatibility between Israelis and Palestinians than either group is willing to recognize. A bi-national future isn’t an unrealistic hope. But for now, a pragmatic peace is most important - for common folk to get on with their lives and passions to cool. Abbas seems like the kind of leader who can move this forward, where Arafat was corrupt and stuck in old habits. Arafat’s death was a blessing for Palestinians. Sharon would be the ideal man on the Israeli side to push through a peace process, in the same sense that Nixon was the ideal American politician to negotiate with “Communist China”, except I don’t think he can be trusted to actually do it. I don’t have a solution to the problems of the Middle East…just some opinions. As for solidarity…if it’s not something I can offer practically and tangibly, I consider it more often than not a conceit. I’m certainly not an ally of any political faction among either the Palestinians or the Israelis. I refuse to compete with Richard Perle, AIPAC or even any left-wing mini-sects in that regard and consider it part of the problem when it infects discussions of U.S. foriegn policy - although it’s most clearly a serious problem as manifested by the Likudnik influence on American politics.
As for Castro, the sooner he goes, the better, for much the same reasons I felt that way about Arafat. Also for the record, my view of Marty Peretz isn’t much better…he’s a dinosaur who’s leadership has, for decades at least, turned into a drag on a venerable institution. But I still read TNR for some of the writing on politics and domestic issues - and Spencer Ackerman and John Judis wrote pretty good stuff on Iraq that went against the tide of TNR’s tendency to conflate imperialism and “liberal internationalism”. (I don’t pay much attention to Cockburn for a number of reasons - but mostly because he’s never really shed his stalinist roots and I’ve come to detest the vanity politics of Naderism through bitter experience. I read a lot of stuff I disagree with, but I tend not to read stuff I disagree with that’s both untrustworty AND politically irrelevant.)
May 25th, 2005 at 11:44 am
I’m not precisely sure what all makes up Marc’s brand of liberalism, although the way I’d piece it together it’s not wildly beyond the mainstream of American political thought. But the notion that communism has a better chance to “come to power in the US” than some brand of “liberalism” - with or without Marc’s stamp of approval - that was so compromised it could accomodate Hiroshima, Batista and napalming Vietnam strikes me as beyond bizarre.
May 25th, 2005 at 11:52 am
I should add that many of burningman’s anecdotal observations on life in Cuba were interesting and credible.
May 25th, 2005 at 4:40 pm
Better beyond bizarre than providing rhetorical cover for US imperial objectives, Reg.
And I meant it. Cooper’s brand of “respectable leftism” has no social base. It’s not going to happen. The Democrats were 80% against the Iraq war, yet their nominee for the presidency supported the war, wished to EXPAND it by bringing in “allies” just like the Brits used to use Indian troops, and supported the Patriot Act. This can’t be repeated enough. Maybe I’m a kook for thinking working people can liberate themselves. Lord knows tired 60s burn-outs have told me often enough that their own youthful fanaticism means any vision of a better world must end in the gulag… but I don’t really care anymore.
If the liberals can’t even muster a fight against Bush’s neo-con/Christian Fascist alliance, then I’ll bet my money on those who do.
The point about the track record of liberalism is that when liberals enjoyed the same hegemony that conservatives have today, they committed some of the worst warcrimes the world has ever seen. I didn’t even add the part about every major city in the country getting burned because people got so sick of the racism. That was liberalism in its heyday. Who’d want to ressurect that?
May 25th, 2005 at 6:55 pm
If 80% of Democrats were against the war, how does “respectable leftism” have “no social base” - especially if we’re comparing it’s chances to “disreputable leftism” ?
A litany of the ills of the Democratic Party - many of them very, very serious - isn’t the equivalent of a sound argument for leftist strategies that simply write the Democratic Party and the Democratic coalition off and start elsewhere from scratch.
Liberals have done more to fight Bush and the right-wing agenda than the far left - by far. Not even a close contest.
Your critique of liberalism’s “crimes” pales against any objective account of the crimes of the Leninist left whenever and wherever it’s gained power. And Democrats - or any left-liberals of independent mind - could openly fight the compromise, corruption and crimes committed by their own alleged “comrades” in power without getting hauled out and shot. In the absence of a consciously progressive, labor-based social-democratic movement like Sweden’s, I’ll take even generic, tepid liberalism, for all of its weaknesses, over Leninist sham-”Marxism” any day.
And you’ve been taking to the wrong “60’s burn-outs” - in my view the excesses of the ’60s - i.e. nihilistic black nationalism, anarchistic ultra-leftism, attempts at leninism-redux and knee-jerk third-worldism - didn’t produce any gulags so much as they undermined any chance of a broad, progressive coalition and fueled the ascendance of the right. The ’60s left, which began the decade with considerable promise, became it’s own worst enemy. If it ended up on a gulag, it mostly sent itself there.
May 25th, 2005 at 6:57 pm
shit…sorry
May 26th, 2005 at 12:30 am
Well, Reg, it’s been fun watching you fend off Mr. Burningham. You can thank your stars his hands are nowhere near the levers of state power. Interesting how the revolutionary left talk about love of the people yet often pulses with such undisguised aspirations toward dictatorship.
I found his anecdote about the police on the malecon to be absolutelly stunningly stupid. Perhaps I should dig him from a story I wrote from Cuba back in the early 1990’s when I saw Che Guevara’s grandson and some of his buddies get tear-gassed by the Havana cops because they were playing in a rock band that wasnt officially authorized!
The only reassuring part of Burningham’s post is that he’s still a kid in his twenties. He’s got at least a 50/50 chance of growing up someday. He’s still got a long of resentment to work through. Meanwhile, I have to get back to all my middle class buddies in the “administration.” LOL!
May 26th, 2005 at 1:03 am
reg - I thought I was the only one who read/subscribed to The Nation, The American Conservative, The New Republic and The American Prospect. Good to find that that’s not the case.
As for the following by Mary Jones:
“Well, the answer should be obvious to anybody who is not drunk on anti-Communist ideology. Nat Hentoff has absolutely no leftist credentials. He uses his Village Voice column to slander the Mideast Languages and Culture Department at Columbia University as anti-Semitic. He argues vociferously against a woman’s right to an abortion. He has even come to the aid of George W. Bush’s dreadful federal court nominees lately. In other words, Hentoff belongs exactly to the reactionary swamp epitomized by Reverend Moon’s Washington Times. It is sad that Marc Cooper cannot discern this, further proof of his steady march to Hitchensville.”
Nat Hentoff has been writing a column for the Washington Times for some years now. Personally, I think it’s great that his writings appear in the same space as the poisonous filth of Cal Thomas, Thomas Sowell and the like. If even 5% of the Wash Times readership actually reads Hentoff’s column it’s a blessing.
You’re right in that, strictly speaking, he’s not a “leftist”, but what does that matter?
As for Hentoff and, by extension (at least according to your post), Cooper being on a steady march to Hitchensville, or already there, this is hogwash.
Hitchens has lambasted Hentoff in the pages of Free Inquiry, for worrying more about the actions of Ashcroft than al-Qaida or some such nonsense. Without ever mentioning Hentoff by name, however.
And Cooper reguarly criticizes the actions of the Bush administration. When was the last time that Hitchens uttered an unkind word about Dear Leader?
Mind you that I strongly disagree with Hentoff’s take on the situation at Columbia, but I’ll confess that I haven’t seen where he’s come to the aide of Bush’s nominees. If you could point me to such a column I’d appreciate it.
May 26th, 2005 at 1:12 am
Thanks Demetrious. Reg, you know better than to say easily pidgeon hole people… Hentoff is Hentoff.. he doent heed be Hitchens. Nor do I, though I wish I had a fourth of Christopher’s talents. Reg, what about you? Dont u have more or less Buchanan’s view on illegal immigration? That’s not an accusation… becaise I actually allow for people being self-contradictory.
Hentoff by the way is a first amendment absolutist. In a partisan world that makes him unwelcome in both parties. One could do worse .
May 26th, 2005 at 8:29 am
It’s pretty clear that silence or mocking is all the response I’ll ever get from Marc in comments here. In this post at least, it’s hard for me to imagine that I’ve committed some offense of tone or unreasonableness, so I’m left to conclude it’s a grudge. No point in beating my head against the wall — Reg holds up the end of things I’d be arguing in any case, so no biggie.
But I do, seriously, want answers to the question I asked about how U.S. citizens can be helpful to a pretty complicated dissident movement. Matt Welch’s article in Reason provides some useful background and a bit more detail on the recent gathering:
http://www.reason.com/links/links052505.shtm
May 26th, 2005 at 8:42 am
marc…I thought I was defending Hentoff against easy pigeionholing. I wasn’t saying he WAS Hitchens, just that he and Hitchens were both hard to pigeionhole and both had fairly complex political trajectories, compared to even, say, my Comrade Pat. (Actually, although I share many of the concerns Pat expresses on illegal immigration as it impacts the job market in the U.S., I’m not a proponent of crazy or selectively punitive stuff such as Prop 187 or a Great Wall - all of which Pat supports. The genial Irish Papist also rattles on about the cultural implications of immigration - which I guess I do share to the extent that I think there are already too damned many Catholics in the country.)
May 26th, 2005 at 1:14 pm
If by growing up Cooper means “learning to accept US domination of the planet” then I suspect not. He has, and that’s obviously his right.
Oh the bravery of standing up to the “crimes of leninism.” How does he do it? What courage of conviction he has pimping his own young “idealism” to now urge everyone else (from the nation of Cuba to the “Mumiacs”) to get in line… I’ve grown into my 30s at this point and watched the liberal left self-destruct a little more each year. If the left only stopped worrying about imperialism and black people and women’s liberation… then we could be “broad.” Just like back in the days when the Democrats were the party of Jim Crow and atom bombs.
While Cooper may not care all that much that the so-called democratic opposition to socialism in Cuba literally plays speeches by George Bush, I can’t help but notice that the one area of Cuba Bush has absolute control over is a concentration camp where tortue is routine and unabashed. Maybe all of Cuba can soon be “Democratic” and they’ll get shantytowns just like “democratic” Latin America.
May 26th, 2005 at 2:49 pm
Demitrious asks for evidence of Hentoff’s arguing on behalf of Bush’s dreadful federal judge nominees. There was an article in last week’s Village Voice that took a swipe at Democratic Party opposition–such as it was. Unfortunately it is not online or I couldn’t find it if it was. In the meantime, you can read Hentoff stumping for the Texas rightwing idiot Priscilla Owen here:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/hentoff091802.asp
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