When Fidel Castro died on Nov. 25 at the age of 90, we lost one of the most remarkable leaders of the 20th century. No other head of state has so steadfastly stood up to the United States and survived.
In 1959, the Cuban Revolution, led by Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, overthrew the ruthless Fulgencio Batista, who had come to power in a coup d’état. Batista’s government had protected the interests of the wealthy landowners. In order to control the populace, Batista had carried out torture and public executions, killing as many as 20,000 people. During his regime, Batista was supported—financially and militarily—by the United States. Indeed, the U.S. Mafia’s gambling, drug and prostitution operations flourished under Batista’s government.
Led by Castro, the new Cuban government expropriated U.S.-owned property, companies and holdings in Cuba. The United States responded with a punishing economic embargo, which later became a blockade. The CIA attempted unsuccessfully to overthrow the revolution in the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
Since 1959, the U.S. government and the expatriated Cuban-Americans who fled Cuba after the revolution have tried mightily to topple the Castro government, without success. Castro survived more than 630 assassination attempts.
The Legacy of Fidel Castro
“What’s amazing here is you’ve got a country that’s suffered an illegal economic blockade by the United States for almost half a century and yet it’s been able to give its people the best standard of health care, brilliant education,” Ken Livingstone, former mayor of London, said in 2006. “To do this in the teeth of an almost economic war is a tribute to Fidel Castro.”
Castro practiced a unique form of internationalism. Nelson Mandela credited Cuba with helping to bring down the system of apartheid in South Africa. Cuba fought with the revolutionaries in Angola. And Cuba regularly sends doctors to other countries and provides foreign nationals with free medical education.
As Nelson Valdes noted in 2013, Castro, together with others, “shaped a foreign policy and national movement around the fundamental concept of national sovereignty, yet devoid of any self-centered nationalism.” He added, “This unique form of national self-determination incorporated other countries on an equal footing. In fact, national sovereignty and solidarity had precedence over ideology.” Thus, Valdes wrote, “Cuba has aided countries, despite the economic and political differences they may have.”
In 1953, in what is considered the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, Castro, his brother Raul and more than 100 other rebels mounted a failed attack against the Batista regime at the Moncada Barracks. Castro was arrested, tried, sentenced to 15 years in prison and released in an amnesty deal two years later.
At his trial, Castro famously said in his defense, “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.”
A History of U.S. Inference in Cuba
The U.S. economic embargo was initiated in 1960 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in response to a memorandum written by L.D. Mallory, a senior State Department official. Mallory proposed “a line of action that makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government.”
Cuba turned to the U.S.S.R. for assistance, which supported the Cuban Revolution until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1962, in response to the stationing of U.S. nuclear missiles in Turkey, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. After a tense standoff, Khrushchev and U.S. President John F. Kennedy negotiated a withdrawal of the missiles from both Cuba and Turkey.
The economic blockade continues to this day. It is an illegal interference in the affairs of the Cuban people, in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Charter of the Organization of American States. Every year for 26 consecutive years, the United Nations General Assembly has called on the United States to lift the blockade, which has cost Cuba in excess of $ 1 trillion.
U.S. meddling in Cuban affairs did not start in 1959. Since 1898, when the United States intervened in Cuba’s war for independence, the U.S. government has tried to dominate Cuba. The United States gained control of Guantanamo Bay in 1903, when Cuba was occupied by the U.S. Army after its intervention in Cuba’s war of independence against Spain.
Cuba was forced to accept the Platt Amendment to its constitution as a prerequisite for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Cuba. That amendment provided the basis for a treaty granting the United States jurisdiction over Guantanamo Bay. The 1903 agreement gave the United States the right to use Guantanamo Bay “exclusively as coaling or naval stations, and for no other purpose.” A 1934 treaty maintained U.S. control over Guantanamo Bay in perpetuity until the United States abandons it or until both Cuba and the United States agree to modify it. That treaty also limits its uses to “coaling and naval stations.”
None of these treaties or agreements gives the United States the right to use Guantanamo Bay as a prison, or to subject detainees to arbitrary detention or torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, which have been documented at the prison.
Castro, who called the Guantanamo base “a dagger plunged into the heart of Cuban soil,” refused to cash the rent checks the U.S. government sends annually. “An elemental sense of dignity and absolute disagreement with what happens in that portion of our national territory has prevented Cuba from cashing those checks,” he noted. The United States, according to Castro, transformed the Guantanamo base into a “horrible prison, one that bears no difference with the Nazi concentration camps.”
It is no accident that President George W. Bush chose Guantanamo Bay as the site for his illegal prison camp. His administration maintained that Guantanamo Bay is not a U.S. territory, and thus, U.S. courts were not available to the prisoners there. But, as the Supreme Court later affirmed, the United States, not Cuba, exercises exclusive jurisdiction over Guantanamo Bay, so habeas corpus is available to prisoners there.
Amnesty International aptly described the irony: “Given the USA’s criticism of the human rights record of Cuba, it is deeply ironic that it is violating fundamental rights on Cuban soil, and seeking to rely on the fact that it is on Cuban soil to keep the U.S. courts from examining its conduct.”
Since the revolution, anti-Cuba organizations based in Miami have engaged in countless terrorist activities against Cuba and anyone who advocated normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba. These terrorist groups have operated with impunity in the United States with the knowledge and support of the FBI and CIA.
For example, Ruben Dario Lopez-Castro, associated with several anti-Castro organizations, and Orlando Bosch, who planted a bomb on a Cubana airliner in 1976, killing all 73 people aboard, “planned to ship weapons into Cuba for an assassination attempt on [Fidel] Castro.”
In the face of this terrorism, the Cuban Five came from Cuba to gather intelligence in Miami in order to prevent future terrorist acts against Cuba. The men peacefully infiltrated criminal exile groups. The Five turned over the results of their investigation to the FBI. But instead of working with Cuba to fight terrorism, the U.S. government arrested and convicted the five men of unfounded charges.
Human Rights in Cuba
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights contain two different sets of human rights, respectively.
Civil and political rights include the rights to life, free expression, freedom of religion, fair trial, self-determination; and to be free from torture, cruel treatment and arbitrary detention.
Economic, social and cultural rights comprise the rights to education, health care, social security, unemployment insurance, paid maternity leave, equal pay for equal work, reduction of infant mortality; prevention, treatment and control of diseases, as well as the rights to form and join unions and strike.
The U.S. government criticizes civil and political rights in Cuba while disregarding Cubans’ superior access to universal housing, health care, education and its guarantee of paid maternity leave and equal-pay rates.
Unlike in the United States, health care is considered a right in Cuba. Universal health care is free to all. Cuba has the highest ratio of doctors to patients in the world, at 6.7 per 1,000 people. The 2014 infant mortality rate was 4.2 per 1,000 live births—one of the lowest in the world.
Free education is a universal right, up to and including higher education. Cuba spends a larger proportion of its gross domestic product on education than any other country in the world.
Cuban law guarantees the right to voluntarily form and join trade unions. Unions are legally independent and financially autonomous, independent of the Communist Party and the state. Unions have the right to stop work they consider dangerous. They have the right to participate in company management, to receive management information, to office space and materials, and to facility time for representatives. Union agreement is required for layoffs, changes in patterns of working hours and overtime, and for input on the annual safety report.
As of 2018, the date of the next Cuban general election and the date Raul Castro has promised to step down from the presidency, there will be a limit of no more than two five-year terms for all senior elected positions, including the president. Anyone can be nominated to be a candidate. It is not required that one be a member of the Communist Party. No money can be spent promoting candidates and no political parties (including the Communist Party) are permitted to campaign during elections. Military personnel are not on duty at polling stations; school children guard the ballot boxes.
In 2006, the World Wildlife Fund, a leading global environmental organization, determined that Cuba was the only country in the world to have achieved sustainable development.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government has committed serious human rights violations on Cuban soil, including torture, cruel treatment and arbitrary detention at Guantanamo. And since 1960, the United States has expressly interfered with Cuba’s economic rights and its right to self-determination through the economic embargo.
Cuba is criticized for its restrictions on freedom of expression. Castro learned from the Guatemalan experience what would happen if he did not keep a tight rein on his revolutionary government. Jacobo Arbenz, a democratically elected president of Guatemala, carried out agrarian land reform, which expropriated uncultivated lands, compensated the owners and redistributed them to the peasantry. This program raised the hackles of the United Fruit Company, which enlisted the U.S. government to overthrow Arbenz. The CIA and the State Department obliged.
Stephen Kinzer wrote in his biography of the Dulles brothers that Guevara “told Castro why [the CIA coup in Guatemala] succeeded. He said Arbenz had foolishly tolerated an open society, which the CIA penetrated and subverted, and also preserved the existing army, which the CIA turned into its instrument. Castro agreed that a revolutionary regime in Cuba must avoid those mistakes. Upon taking power, he cracked down on dissent and purged the army.”
Obama Opens the Door to Normalization
In 2006, Castro suffered a serious illness and turned over the reins of power in Cuba to his brother Raul, who became president in 2008.
On March 21, 2016, President Obama and Raul Castro held a joint press conference at the Palace of the Revolution in Havana. Obama notably declared, “Perhaps most importantly, I affirmed that Cuba’s destiny will not be decided by the United States or any other nation. Cuba is sovereign and, rightly, has great pride. And the future of Cuba will be decided by Cubans, not by anybody else.” Unlike all prior U.S. presidents, Obama understands the significance of treating Cuba with respect.
This is a lesson Donald Trump will hopefully learn. The president-elect has sent mixed signals about whether he will continue Obama’s steps toward normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba. The businessman in him will be receptive to investment, and, indeed, hotel building, in Cuba.
But, pandering to Cuban-Americans in Florida during the election, Trump talked tough against Cuba’s government. “Many of our leaders seem to view Florida’s Cuban conservatives, including the assassins and terrorists among them, as People Who Vote,” Alice Walker wrote in “The Sweet Abyss.”
On the Cuban side, Raul Castro has made it clear that normalization cannot occur until the blockade is lifted and the United States returns Guantanamo to Cuba. In an op-ed in The New York Times, Harvard lecturer Jonathan Hansen wrote, “It is past time to return this imperialist enclave to Cuba,” adding, “It has served to remind the world of America’s long history of interventionist militarism.”
Normalization of relations will not happen overnight, Rene Gonzalez, one of the Cuban Five, told me when I visited Cuba last year. “We have to remember that relations between the countries have never been normal.” Antonio Guerrero, another member of the Five, added that normalization will require “the dismantling of the whole system of aggression against Cuba, especially the blockade.”
Castro survived 90 years. And Castro’s revolution survives, notwithstanding 57 years of aggression and assassination attempts by the United States.
“Fidel Castro was an authoritarian. He ruled with an iron fist. There was repression and is repression in Cuba. In Fidel’s kind of argument, he did it in the name of a different kind of democracy, a different kind of freedom—the freedom from illness, the freedom from racism, the freedom from social inequality,” Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project, told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! “And Cuba has a lot of very positives that all the other countries that we don’t talk about don’t have. There isn’t gang violence in Cuba. People aren’t being slaughtered around the streets by guns every day. They defeated the Zika virus right away. There is universal health care and universal education.”
In a 1998 NBC interview with Maria Shriver, Castro wryly noted, “For a small country such as Cuba to have such a gigantic country as the United States live so obsessed with this island, it is an honor for us.”
History has absolved, and promises to continue to absolve, “El Comandante” Fidel Castro.
Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her most recent book is “Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.” Visit her website and follow her at Twitter @marjoriecohn.
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4 Comments
I’m glad among other things, Marjorie pointed out the fact that Cuba’s regular elections will also include elections for President and all the other executive as well as the assembly in 2018.
I hope the United States breaks with its usual policy of treating open democracies as an exploitable weakness to corrupt and gain control over other nation’s self determination and that the Cuban people can vote in peace.
Thank You as always for your fresh, factual and human rights focused articles!
Thought I’d add this. I could post the whole book or that of Frank Fernandez but that’s too much work. This amount will do. Tired of such fawning over of, to put it mildly, coordinators, of the coordinator class no less.
SAM DOLGOFF
“THE CUBAN REVOLUTION: AN ANARCHIST PERSPECTIVE
(INTRODUCTION)
Between reactionary “pro-Batistianos” and “revolutionary Castroites,” an adequate assessment of the Cuban Revolution must take into account another, largely ignored dimension, i.e., the history of Cuban Anarchism and its influence on the development of the Cuban labor and socialist movements, the position of the Cuban anarchist movement with respect to the problems of the Cuban Revolution, and libertarian alternatives to Castroism.
Today’s Cuban “socialism” differs from the humanistic and libertarian values of true socialism as does tyranny from freedom. There is not the remotest affinity between authoritarian socialism or its Castro variety and the libertarian traditions of the Cuban labor and socialist movements.
The character of the Latin American labor movement — like the Spanish revolutionary movement from which it derived its orientation — was originally shaped, not by Marxism, but by the principles of anarcho-syndicalism worked out by Bakunin and the libertarian wing of the International Workingmen’s Association — the “First International” — founded in 1864.
The Latin American labor movement was, from its inception, greatly influenced by the ideology and revolutionary tactics of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement. Even before 1870, there were organized anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist groups in Buenos Aires,
Argentina; Mexico, Santiago, Chile; Montevideo, Uruguay; Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil.
In 1891, a congress of trade unions in Buenos Aires organized the Federacion Obrera Argentina which was in 1901 succeeded by the Federacion Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA-Regional Labor Federation of Argentina) with 40,000 members, which in 1938 reached 300,000. The anarcho-syndicalist La Protesta, one of the best anarchist periodicals in the world, founded as a daily in 1897, often forced to publish clandestinely, is still being published as a monthly.
In Paraguay, anarcho-syndicalist groups formed in 1892 were in 1906 organized into the Federacion Obrera Regional Paraguaya. The anarcho-syndicalist unions of Chile in 1893 published the paper El Oprimido (The Oppressed). In the late 1920s the Chilean Administration of the IWW numbered 20,000 workers. Before then, many periodicals were published and the labor movement flourished. The journal Alba, organ of the Santiago Federation of Labor, was founded in 1905. The anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist groups and their publications were very popular with the workers in San Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica (where the anarchist paper Renovacion first appeared in 1911).
To illustrate the scope of the anarcho-syndicalist movement in Latin America, attention is called to the organizations participating in the syndicalist groupings, convened by the FORA of Argentina in Buenos Aires. Besides the FORA, there were represented Paraguay, by the Centro Obrera Paraguaya; Bolivia, by the Federacion Local de La Paz and the groups La Antorcha and Luz y Libertad; Mexico, by the Pro-Accion Sindical; Brazil, by the trade unions from seven
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constituent provinces; Costa Rica, by the organization, Hacia la Libertad; and the Chilean administration of the IWW. These examples give only a sketchy idea of the extent of the movement. (sources: The Anarchist historian Max Nettlau’s series of articles reprinted in Reconstruir, Rocker’s Anarcho-Syndicalism, India edition, pgs. 183-184; no date)
Insofar as the history of anarcho-syndicalist movements in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, and other Latin American lands are concerned, there is a voluminous literature in Spanish, and some, though by no means enough, works in English. Unfortunately there is scarcely anything, in any language, about the history of Cuban Anarcho-Syndicalism.
The anarcho-syndicalist origins of the Cuban labor movement and its influence is substantiated by the Report on Cuba, issued by the conservative International Bank for Reconstruction and Development:
… in the colonial days, labor leadership in Cuba came largely from anarcho-syndicalists of the Bakunin school. A strong thread of their ideology with its emphasis on ‘direct action’, its contempt for legality, its denial that there can be common interests for workers and employers, persists in the Cuban labor movement in modern times … it must be remembered that nearly all popular education of working people on how an economic system works and what might be done to improve it, came first from the anarcho-syndicalists … (quoted in Background to Revolution: Development of Modern Cuba; New York, 1966, p. 31, 32)
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Even the communist historian Boris Nikirov concedes that
… the labor movement of Cuba has had a long tradition of radical orientation.
Anarcho- Syndicalist influence was important from the late 1890’s to the 1920’s (quoted ibid. p. 135) [Anarcho-Syndicalist influence certainly spans a longer period.]
Even less is known about the anarcho-syndicalist roots of the Puerto Rican labor movement, which as in Cuba, traces back to the latter half of the 19th century. The editor of the excellent anthology of labor struggles and socialist ideology in Puerto Rico, A.G. Quintero Rivera asks:
… who even in Puerto Rico knows about readers in tobacco workrooms? [as in Cuba and Florida, workers paid readers to read works of social and general interest to them while they made cigars] Who knows that Puerto Rican study groups in the first decade of this century studied the works of the [anarchists] Bakunin, Kropotkin, Reclus and the history of the First International Workingmen’s Association … that as early as 1890, Bakunin’s Federalism and Socialism was published by anarchist groups in Puerto Rico and widely read by the workers? …
Quintero informs the reader that in 1897, the anarchist, Romero Rosa, a typographer, was one of the “principal founders of the first nationwide union in Puerto Rico — the Federacion Regional Obrera.” Together with Fernando Gomez Acosta, a carpenter, and Jose Ferrer y Ferrer, also a typographer, Romero Rosa founded the weekly Ensayo
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Obrera to spread anarcho-syndicalist ideas among the workers.
Louisa Capetillo, the Emma Goldman of Puerto Rico, whom Quintero calls a “legendary figure in the history of the Puerto Rican labor movement,” was a gifted speaker and organizer who addressed countless meetings all over Puerto Rico in the late 1890s and early 1900s. She championed women’s rights and preached free love (further defying convention by wearing pantaloons).
A prolific writer, Louisa Caprtillo wrote — in Spanish — such libertarian essays as: Humanity in the Future; My View of Freedom; Rights and Duties of Woman as Comrade, Mother and Free Human Being. She also wrote and spoke extensively on art and the theater and carried on an extensive correspondence with foreign anarchists.
Between the years 1910 and 1920, anarchist and syndicalist periodicals were published in Puerto Rico and syndicalists carried on an intense agitation and militant action in labor struggles. (source: Lucha Obrera en Puerto Rico; 2nd edition, 1974, pgs. 1, 14, 34, 153, 156, 161.)
The example of Puerto Rico illustrates how little is known about the anarcho-syndicalist origins of the labor and socialist movements in the Caribbean area. This work tries to trace the remarkable influence of anarchism in the development of the Cuban revolutionary movement and to present the anarchist view of the Cuban Revolution.
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CASTRO’S FRIENDLY CRITICS
FROM WALDO FRANK TO RENE DUMONT
The repercussions of the Cuban Revolution are still being felt in Latin America and throughout the world. The character of the Revolution is being passionately debated. Many of Castro’s original leftist and liberal supporters who have witnessed the gradual degeneration of the Revolution into a totalitarian dictatorship have been forced, much against their inclinations, to accept this disappointing reality. In the process of accounting for the degeneration, these friendly critics clarify certain crucial facts about the Cuban Revolution which confirm the libertarian position, although most of them vehemently deny that this is indeed the case.
Still others, the more fanatical pro-Castroites, in trying to explain the dictatorial measures of the regime, fall into the most glaring contradictions — which serve only to emphasize the unpleasant facts they try to camouflage. A few typical examples are arranged chronologically to illustrate the progression of events.
Waldo Frank’s Cuba: A Prophetic Island (New York, 1961) is particularly disappointing because he had always been a consistent anti-state communist, strongly influenced by libertarian ideas, which he amply demonstrated by his sympathetic attitude towards the CNT (anarcho-syndicalist union confederation of Spain). That Frank with 40 years study of Spanish and Latin American history should have allowed his pro-Castro euphoria to becloud his judgement to the point where he could not recognize the obvious earmarks of a dictatorship in the making is unpardonable.
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Although Frank was granted a two year subsidy by the Cuban government to write his book, he insists that his “only obligation was to seek the truth as I found it” (Preface). Nevertheless Frank’s
“unbiased” evaluation of Castro’s personality and achievements rivals the tributes heaped upon Stalin by his sycophants. Thus:
… the Chevrolet rolled into the first streets of Matanzas … the crowd blocking Castro’s way had, somehow, the shape of Casto … and what was the shape of Castro? Was it not Cuba itself? (p. 79) … in his exquisite sensibilities … Castro is less the poet and the LOVER … to call Castro a dictator is dishonest semantics … (p. 141, Frank’s emphasis)
In the very next paragraph Frank unwittingly marshalls crushing arguments against himself. Castro will not tolerate criticism:
… he likes to have intellectuals around him, not so much to discuss ideas as to fortify his actions and ideas … (p. 141) [in other words, Castro must, like Stalin, surround himself with fawning flatterers] Castro is not a dictator, [but] … there always comes a time, when leaders must dare, for the people’s sake, to oppose the people … (p. 62) … there are times of nation ferver when an opposition press becomes a nuisance … [just because there are no elections in Cuba] … the opposition slanders Castro. [How dare they call him] “‘totalitarian’ ‘communist’!?” (p. 16)
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… [In spite of Frank’s pro-Castro obsession, traces of anarcho-syndicalist influence come through] … the Cubans do not know that mere natiuonalization of their industries is no goal, that it may enthrone a bureaucracy even more rigid than capitalist posession. Nationalization is not necessarily true socialization, an end which demands [that there be workers in each industry to run these industries in coordination with the other sectors of the economy]. (p. 134)
Does Frank indict Castro for instituting nationalization? By no means! On the contrary, he considers that Castro summary
… act of nationalization was an intelligent, courageous deed … to defend the Cuban Republic against those hostile forces that would destroy it … (p. 134) [Frank is even afraid] that … technicians from the Soviet Union will bring with them the communist ideology … equally alien, equally unwelcom … (p. 136) [But Frank hastens to dispel such fears] … the leaders are GOOD and what they are attempting to do is GOOD … they will tell you in plain words that they have not overthrown the overlordship of the United States in order to submit to a new master … the Soviet Union or anyone else … (p. 136) (Frank’s emphasis)
Unfortunately, it turns out that the “good” men destined to save Cuba from totalitarian domination are themselves authoritarian communists: Armando Hart, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, and irony of ironies! Castro himself, a few days after the American publication of Frank’s book, confessed
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that “I am a Marxist-Leninist and will remain one until the last day of my life.”
In spite of Castro’s own statement that the so-called peasant cooperative farms (granjas del pueblo) are modeled after the Russian style “Kolkhozes,” Frank still nurtures the forlorn hope that the:
… cooperative farms and industries of Cuba could well become the nuclei of a radical syndicalism, developed from the tradition of anarcho- syndicalism, which has long appealed to Spanish and Hispanic workers … far more than the crude kolkhoz within communism, libertarianism might flourish within a revived syndicalism … (p. 186)
In early 1963, members of the Cuban Libertarian Movement in Exile (CLME) addressed a letter to Pablo Casals, a co-sponsor of the Spanish Refuge Aid Committee, informing him that Waldo Frank, also a co-sponsor, had been commissioned by the Cuban Government to write a book in which he eulogized Castro. In its Bulletin for April 1963, the CLME published Casals’ reply:
… like you, I too believe that all lovers of freedom … must condemn all dictatorship, “right,” “left” or whatever the name … I feel strongly the anguish of the unfortunate people of Cuba, who, having suffered under the dictatorship of Batista, are now, anew, being subjected to the dictatorship of his successor, Fidel Castro … as to the attitude of Waldo Frank and his support of the Castro regime, I will immediately request the Spanish Refugee Aid Committee to order a thorough investigation of your charges, and if — as it seems — Waldo
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Frank violates the ideals of the organization, he be removed as member and co-sponsor … With best wishes, Pablo Casals.
In 1964 Monthly Review, a Marxist-Leninist journal, published a special 96 page essay, Inside the Cuban Revolution, written by Adolfo Gilly, a fanatical “left wing” pro-Castro Argentine journalist who lived among the Cuban people for more than ayear. Although Gilly acknowledges the deformation of the Cuban revolution, he is
“… still unconditionally on the side of the Revolution.” (preface, p. vii) Gilly was nevertheless bitterly denounced by Castro. The following excerpts from his essay best illustrate the kind of muddled thinking which leads to the most glaring contradictions by “leftist” Castroite critics:
Statement: “the State defends the position … and concrete economic interests of the functionaries, the State itself, the Party and the union bureaucracy … the people have no direct power … the State creates and defends positions of privilege.” (p. 42) Contradiction: “The State is the workers’ very own” (p.46)
Statement: “Just as there has not appeared in the Cuban leadership any tendency that proposes self-management, neither has there appeared any which looks to the development of those bodies which in a socialist democracy express the will of the people; soviets, workers’ councils, unions independent of the State, etc. …” (p. 40-41) Contradiction: “… in Cuba the masses feel that they have begun to govern their own lives …” (p. 78)
Statement: “When it comes to decisions of the government, it never allows dissent or criticism or proposals for change … nothing can be published without permission …” (p.28)
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Contradiction: “There is no country today where there is greater freedom and democracy than in Cuba.” (ibid.)
Like Gilly, the editors of the Monthly Review, Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, also combine extravagant praise with what adds up to a devastating indictment of the Castro regime:
… the success achieved by the Cuban Revolution … the upsurge of mass living standard to create a quantity and quality of popular support for the Revolutionary Government … and its supreme leader Fidel Castro … has few, if any, parallels (Socialism in Cuba; N.Y., New York, 1970, p. 203, 204) … there have been remarkable achievements in the economic field and there will be even more remarkable ones in the future … (p. 65)
Huberman and Sweezy then inadvertantly deny their own statements:
nearly everything is scarce in Cuba today (p. 129) … there is the continuing difficult economic situation. Daily life is hard, and after ten years many people are tired … tending to lose confidence in the leadership’s ability to keep its optimistic promises … the ties that bind the masses to their paternalistic government are beginning to erode … (p. 217-218)
While the examples of the alleged economic “achievementes” are indeed rare, the catastrophic collapse of the economy and the mass discontent for which the “Revolutionary Government” is directly responsible are
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overwhelmingly documented. (see pgs. 74, 81, 82, 86, 103, 107, 200, 205-207, 217-220)
To create material incentives and reduce absenteeism the Revolutionary leadership, to its everlasting credit … has at no time committed the folly of restoring the capitalist wage system in which … whoever works harder gets more … Castro is quoted: “to offer a man more for doing his duty is to buy his conscience with money.” (p. 145)
A few pages later, Huberman and Sweezy again refute themselves. The Revolution can be saved only if the capitalist wage system is restored. Now, the “… Revolution cannot afford to rely exclusively on political and moral incentives”; it will even have to resort to semi-militarization of work!” (p. 153)
The assertion that the “… Cuban Revolution has resorted to very little regimentation is refuted in the same paragraph:
… there are doubtless evidences of this in the large-scale mobilizations of voluntary labor … indeed, there are already signs of this regimentation in the growing role of the army in the economy bringing with it military concepts of organization and discipline … an example of this is the Che Guevara Trail Blazers Brigade, organized along strictly military lines [which] has been clearing huge amounts of land … (p. 146) Cuba’s system is clearly one of bureaucratic rule … [nor has the government worked out] an alternative … (p. 219-220)
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For Huberman and Sweezy, the realization of socialism is, in effect, based upon the omnipotence of the State. The people are not the masters but the servants of the
“revolutionary” leadership who graciously grant them the privilege of sharing “in the great decisions which shape their lives…” (p. 204)
To ignore the lessons of history and expect rulers to voluntarily
surrender or even share power with their subjects is — to say the least — incredibly naive.
Herbert Matthews — foreign correspondent and later a senior editor of the New York Times, now retired — was granted his sensational interview with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra on February 17, 1957. Matthews has since then been welcomed to Cuba and granted interviews with Castro and other leaders. His attitude towards the
Castro dictatorship resembles that of the doting parent who inflates the virtues of his offspring and invents excuses for the child’s transgressions.
… Fidel’s personality is overwhelming. He has done many things that enraged me. He has made colossal mistakes … but we must forgive him, he has to deal with difficult problems which no man could have tried to solve without making errors and causing harm to large sectors of Cuban society… (p. 4)
Not the least of the privileges accorded to despots is the right to make mistakes at the expense of ordinary mortals.
How Castro, who is “… a great orator … the greatest of his times,” is “not able to express his emotions” (p. 44) is a
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peculiar failing that Matthews does not deem it necessary to explain.”
Although his latest work (a big 486 page volume, Revolution in Cuba; New York, 1975) contains a great deal of valuable information about the situation in Cuba, it suffers from his clumsy efforts to reconcile his unabashed admiration for Castro with the brutal, bitter facts. Out of the chaotic mass of contradictions, absurdities and distortions, startling facts about the degeneration of the Cuban Revolution emerge. A few examples:
Castro is a dictator. His revolution is “autocratic,” but it is still — strangely enough — “… a government by consensus, based upon popular support …” The support comes from the members of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) comprising “almost every able bodied adult in Cuba … everyone PARTICIPATES in the Cuban Revolution…” But this grass-roots consensus which is not “a democracy … has nothing to do with civil liberties …” (p. 15, Matthews’ emphasis)
It should be obvious that a regime that has “nothing to do with civil rights” is by definition a dictatorship.”
Thank you so much Marjorie Cohn for an excellent article on Fidel Castro, who never gave in to the diktat of U.S. imperialists and stood firm for the independence of Cuba under extremely difficult conditions created by the U.S. rulers and their economic blockade of the island nation.
“Fidel Castro was an authoritarian. He ruled with an iron fist. There was repression and is repression in Cuba. In Fidel’s kind of argument, he did it in the name of a different kind of democracy, a different kind of freedom—the freedom from illness, the freedom from racism, the freedom from social inequality,” Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project, told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! “
The above makes no sense to me. Well, maybe it does in some sense but, shit, no it doesn’t make any at all. What’s this different kind of democracy and the different kind of freedom you can achieve using authoritarian methods, an iron fist and repression? Freedom from those things would mean freedom from repression, an iron fist and an authoritarian leader.
But I suppose the Maximum Leader can and should? be absolved.
I understand good things achieved, needed and desired. I understand the bullshit, the violence, the aggression, Cuba was up against when Big Daddy White Geezer wants everyone to dance his dance, but I do not understand the above quote.
Michael Albert wrote in 2003,
“At the same time, no matter how you look at it, one-person-rule through a bureaucratic hierarchical party is dictatorship, even when, as in Cuba, the leader is in many respects benevolent. Castro is the
hub; the Cuban Communist Party radiates the spokes. Parallel grassroots institutions, including what is called Poder Popular, represent a participatory political trend that has, however, failed to transcend
party manipulation.”
I’ll guess we’ll see what “normalisation leads to