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ALL ABOARD: CHOMSKY, GALEANO, ZINN ON THE ANTI-CUBA TRAIN
By Jon Hillson
LOS ANGELES--More than four centuries ago, Dante--long before social revolutions helped blaze trails of human emancipation, of which Cuba is the living example today--said that the "hottest corners of hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, remain neutral." Today, it can be argued that greater heat awaits those whose decisions make neutrality appear as a lesser evil.
As Washington's unrelenting campaign of disinformation and dirty war intensifies against Cuba, sides are being drawn up around the world. The aims of the United States are clear. Having failed to dislodge a popular revolutionary government--whose immense majority of millions took to the streets of Cuba on May Day under the slogan, "In Defense of Socialism"--with invasion, sabotage, terrorism, and the longest and most stringent sanctions regime against any country in history, Washington seeks to create a fifth column of paid agents to build its slanderous claims against Cuba and justify coming acts of aggression.
Its cynical policies stimulating life-taking passages to the United States, in violation of bilateral treaty accords. Washington enourages such departures by its granting of only seven percent of the agreed "minimum" of immgrants in the previous six month cycle.
Unlike Cuba, which more than two decades ago began returning hijackers--and their pirated modes of transportation--to the the U.S., thus ending such criminal behavior, Washington has welcomed the overwhelming majority of Cuban hijackers, and seized already stolen Cuban property. It thus promotes terrorist piracy. Against this backdrop--and in the context of 44 years of aggression--Cuba has exercised its sovereignty.
Havana, of course, opposes the maximum penalty, using it as a last resort. It has no death row, and capital punishment is not aimed at working people, Blacks, and Latinos. Unlike U.S. police forces, it does not use torture to extract confessions, revelations of which in Chicago last year compelled Governor George Ryan to release four death row inmates in Illinois.
The predictable condemnation of the U.S. government and its kept press is seamless. On April 8, the House of Representatives voted 414 to 0 to denounce Havana. This measure was approved by liberal luminaries from Charles Rangel to Jose Serrano and Bernard Sanders, the "independent socialist." Preceeding this vote came predictable repudiations from former U.S. diplomat Wayne Smith. On April 24, the Cuba Policy Foundation, which expressed the desires of some sectors of U.S. big business for increased trade with Havana, summarily folded as a supposed protest of "repression" in Cuba.
Internationally, these forces have been joined by Jose Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel laureate and longtime member of the Portuguese Communist Party, the French Communist Party, Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, and Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano.
Writing in the Mexican daily La Jornada, Galeano invoked German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg--against Lenin--and thus Fidel and the Cuban revolution. His deceitful piece is revealing.
Galeano wrote, "Rosa Luxemburg, who gave her life for the socialist revolution, disagreed with Lenin in the project for a new society. She wrote prophetic words about what she didn't want. Although she was assassinated in Germany 85 years ago, her words still resonate: 'Freedom only for those who approve of the Government, only for Party members, no matter how numerous they are, is not freedom.'" The familiar quotations go on.
Galeano, a historian of repute, neglects to acquaint the uninformed reader of the fate of her remarks, which were made while Luxemburg was in prison, and thus received only limited and distorted information. Upon her release, when she learned the facts of the Russian revolution and the role of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, she thoroughly renounced her words. She became a founder of the German Communist Party, seeking with Karl Liebknicht to emulate the Russian example.
For this act, she was indeed murdered. Galeano judiciously refrains from identifying the perpetrators: thugs unleashed by the Social Democratic Party government, which opposed the German working class taking power. This is because their lineal descendants now rail against the "Castro dictatorship."
Galeano's slander of Cuba--and the Russian revolution--along with his abuse of Rosa Luxemburg reflect his panic in the face of the assumed invincibility of the U.S. empire, whose wrath Cuba has aroused by having the temerity to defend its sovereignty. Galeano's fire is aimed at democratic, progessive-minded forces as he capitulates to Washington's campaign, therefore providing "left" cover for the White House. We are socialists, he says, but not that kind of socialist. In a way, he is right.
The same approach is taken now by the iconic figures Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, who, among others, have signed the statement promoted by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, entitled "Antiwar, Social Justice and Human Rights Advocates Oppose Repression in Cuba."
It is an unambiguous condemnation of Cuba's exercise of sovereign rights to defend itself against the intervention of a foreign power which for 44 years has sworn to overthrow the revolution. It begins and ends with repudiation of every act Cuba has carried out through its judicial and penal system. The signers generously "recall too the long criminal record of U.S. interventions in Latin America," as if this ceremonial homage to memory adds some kind of balance to their thorough rebuke of Cuba. But "balance" is neither possible nor their intent. It is only window dressing for the real message.
"We support civil liberties and democratic rights everywhere, regardless of the country's economic, political or social system," Chomsky, Zinn, Cornel West, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jean Garofalo, and others assert, as if these rights transcend reality, social context, and concrete situations.
This utopian notion is not progressive, but reactionary.
Whose "civil liberties and democratic rights" were really violated in Cuba? Those of the immense majority, who by a vote of more than eight million in secret ballot in last year's national plebiscite, affirmed that the gains of the socialist revolution are "irreversible." The 75 "dissidents" were not engaged in the expression of "ideas" or the practice of "freedom of association," which are protected by the Cuban Constitution, the most democratic in the world, which was ratified in national referendum 27 years ago.
Freedom of speech is not an absolute, anywhere. In Cuba it is limited by laws and statutes that prohibit collaboration with U.S. entities undermining national interests and security. There is no "right" to accept funding from U.S. agencies to help advance the "transition to democracy" in Cuba--code word for regime change, possible only through direct military intervention by the United States.
Freedom of association ends at the entrance to the U.S. Interests Section, which directs, finances, and organizes such activities. There is no democratic right in Cuba to overthrow the revolution. This reality is anchored in 44 years of struggle, which long ago established the ruling power of the producing majority, the working people and the peasantry, in alliance with all of progessive Cuban society.
This is different than, let us say, the United States, where capital--not labor--rules, and working people and oppressed nationalities must fight to defend democratic gains won in social struggle over centuries. Democracy, democratic rights, and civil liberties are class questions, rooted in who rules society, and in whose interests.
By arguing for absolute civil liberties and democratic rights, Chomsky, Zinn, and West dodge the fact that such idealized abstractions exist nowhere in the world, particularly in the United States. This brutal power, 29 times the size of Cuba, wages economic and political war on Cuba, and seeks to deprive David of his only weapons against Goliath, in the name of "human rights" and "civil liberties."
All the caveats and disclaimers raised in the Campaign for Peace and Democracy statement cannot keep it from siding objectively with Washington, since it is the United States government that leads the real campaign for "peace" and "democracy," U.S.-style in Cuba. The Cuban people, in blood and combat, made a real transition from this model in 1959-61.
It is impossible to find in the statement a single word of condemnation of Washington for its criminal, illegal, century-long occupation of Guantanamo, where 660 prisoners of its Afghan aggression are now held without charges, including minors, where 19 prisoners have attempted suicide 23 times, where a new mental ward was established in March with 80 inmates, so tortuous are conditions there. The prisoners have no access to families, visitors, or lawyers. According to the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, so what?
But it's at Guantanamo where the investigation of abuses of civil liberties and human rights should begin, on U.S. "property" maintained by military force against the expressed will of the Cuban people. The Cuban government, since 1959, has not cashed a single one of the $3000 checks Washington submits as annual payment--pennies an acre--for its lease, granted "perpetuity" some 70 years ago. This is an eternal contract, according to Washington. Not a syllable of protest on this from the latest advocates of "civil liberties and democratic rights" in Cuba.
Zinn and Chomsky call themselves "libertarian anarchists." They in principle reject any state as an inherently reactionary instrument, no matter whose interests it defends, and in whose hands state power is exerted. The Cuban workers state, a revolutionary state, is thus the enemy. This position collapses in the face of crisis and struggle, and offers only misleadership when real, human stakes--not academic discourses in college classrooms--are ivolved.
Similarly, the notion that the state is "neutral" is likewise deadly, as proven in Chile, where a reformist government was overthrown by the armed forces of the capitalist state. President Salvador Allende appointed Augusto Pinochet chief of those forces, citing his promise of remaining "neutral" and "respecting" the constitution, a month before the bloody 1973 coup--the approach of which Fidel alerted the Chilean people, to no avail.
Bravo to John Gerassi, author, educator, and veteran defender of Cuba, who dispenses with diplomacy in upbraiding Chomsky and Zinn--a wake-up call to those who have hung on their words in the past--when he says, "You want the Cuban people to 'organize freely.' How naive! With U.S. money, agents, saboteurs and subservient political parties!"
"How dare you sign a statement which compares Cuba's executions to the U.S's? Where's your understanding of history?" Gerassi demands.
Indeed. Would these palladins of absolute rights have penned a condemnation of Lincoln's suppression of the "democratically elected" Maryland legislature to thwart secessionist efforts during the Civil War? Do they believe the sharp curtailment of "civil liberties" for pro-slave elements in the North merited repudiation by "defenders of democratic rights everywhere?"
Remember, the revolutionary wing of the Republican Party, the radical republicans, demanded even more sweeping measure--of which historian Howard Zinn is well aware.
A study of Union actions of all kinds, including infiltration of northern pro-Confederate forces, summary trials, and other "drastic"--that is, historically decisive and progressive--actions verifies, as pacifist David McReynolds notes in deconstructing Chomsky, that, "Revolutions are not tidy things." Especially when the Cubans go up against the United States, 90 miles from its shores.
Boiled of its tired, ritual, and hence empty criticisms of U.S. policies, the Campaign for Peace and Democracy statement is an anti-Cuba screed. Its hatred of Havana is barely concealed, and is its reason for being. Why write it otherwise, especially now?
Comsky's hostility to Cuba is nothing new. "As for the regime," he told Z magazine in 1994, "it's a dictatorship, often brutal though a teddy bear in comparison with numerous U.S. friends and clients." Obviously, not much of a teddy bear any more. "Personally, I'd like to see the regime overthrown by an internal libertarian revolution (and not that one alone)," he said, convinced that the emancipation of Cuba from U.S. and other foreign exploiters failed to meet his lofty standards.
Chomsky allows that he doesn't "expect the U.S. to implement such initiatives" and if somebody else could carry out such an overturn, "I wouldn't want them to intervene." Now there's a tip of the hat to anti-imperialism.
The point is clear. Chomsky thought--nearly a decade ago--that the "brutal dictatorship" in Cuba should be "overthrown" by nothing less than something which, like absolute, transcendent democratic rights, has never existed, a "libertarian revolution," one that creates a new society without a state to defend itself against external aggression and internal counterrevolution, both of which Washington has mounted against Cuba, only to be defeated by an armed, conscious, and defiant people, imbued with the practice and spirit of internationalism.
"Only the workers and farmers will go all the way," revolutionary nationalist Augusto Cesar Sandino proclaimed as he led the fight against U.S. intervention in Nicaragua eight decades ago. Cuba's effectively organized working people have proven that dictum in the affirmative. History is littered with defeated revolutionary processes which lacked such intransigent, conscious leadership.
That is why Washington hates and fears Cuba's example, why it has incessantly tried to snuff it, and why in today's explosive world it works overtime to slander and destabilize it.
The United States could care less about civil liberties, democratic, and human rights. This entire framework is a fraud and a trap, into which the "democratic left" and the Campaign for Peace and Democracy conveniently fall, oiled by the resurrection of discredited quotes from Rosa Luxemburg and pious lectures from "leftist" writers who observe the world from the safe confines of their comfortable desks.
"We are learning who our real friends are," Cuban Interests Section Chief Dagoberto Rodriguez recently told guests at Cuba's diplomatic offices. "And some who we thought were friends are revealing themselves for what they are."
Some who defend Cuba suggest that the denounciations raised by "progressives" and "democratic leftists" are due to a "lack of information."
This, too, is false. Such a claim assumes these forces make decisions based on available data, not because they reflect their social mileu and economic class position, which links them to bourgeois values and all the pressures to that compel them to conform to the status quo, its perks, privileges, and semi-celebrity niches. Their "loyal opposition" today becomes more and more loyal, and less and less oppositional. This process is not new, and it will grow, driven by the centrifugal tensions at the heart of a crisis-ridden world economic system Fidel has accurately characterized as "unsustainable" and "unbearablele." So-called fellow-travelers always melt under the heat generated by the ruling class and its institutions. Cuba requires real defenders, not camp followers prone to flee as a serious fight approaches.
There is no question that many who have been sympathetic to Cuba but have never studied in detail or learned in depth about the revolution, its history, and methods--and have only a modest grasp of Washington's massive and relentless campaign to cripple it--suffer this absence of facts and the truth.
Their questions and concerns deserve concrete responses, real information, and genuine, civil, and fraternal engagement. Public meetings which stimulate and encourage such frank, open, and healthy exchanges are essential to broader education and winning solid partisans.
These will be particularly valuable for the new generation of fighters propelled into political action by Washington's current and coming brutalities, attacks on democratic rights, and the gains of labor, the Black and Latino struggles, and the women's movement. Armed with the truth about the Cuban revolution, they will best absorb and apply its lessons and be its most outstanding and inspired defenders.
But the crowd of public repudiators of Cuba--from Saramago to Galeano, from Smith to the congressional liberals, from the Campaign for Peace and Democracy to the Democratic Left, along with other fainthearts and fairweather types, are not neophytes nor naive.
They know exactly what they are doing and why. They are veterans of decades of political activity--they do not let us forget this. For that reason, their decision jump ship should not be treated with sentimentality or diplomacy but political precision and honesty.
They had, in fact, all the "information" they needed to accomplish their primary goal: to produce a statement denouncing "repression" in Cuba, to get Cuba, the revolution, and Fidel off their chests, and most importantly, by so doing, get out of the line of fire. Their objective role has been to confuse and disorient many who defend Cuba, impeding the organization of a campaign to get out the truth about what Havana has done and why. Their success in this endeavor has been the delay in mounting such a necessary response.
They cannot stomach what Fidel said on April 25 at the conclusion of his detailed assessment of events to the Cuban people: "Thanks to all those friends of Cuba who have defended her in this glorious moment! We shall continue to be upright and consistent, as we have since 1959 until today. They will never have a reason to be ashamed of their noble support." The moment is glorious because Cuba decided to defend its sovereignty, come what may. Its actions were a body blow to the fifth column, its northern patrons, and would-be terrorist hijackers, and an object lesson that self-determination is not protected without stern measures, courageously taken by a people ready, willing, and able to engage the aggessor.
This message can only be welcomed by real citizens of the world--who are not "American progressives"--but internationalists who believe, as Marti explained, "homeland is humanity," above all who stand up to Washington and fight for a planet with neither borders nor empires, those who celebrate every blow the oppressed and exploited strike against the new, and last, Rome.
The battle emerging between the United States and Cuba--in the context of the Iraq war and all it implies, and the wars to come, including the war at home that is just underway--has two sides.
There is no gray area, no middle ground, no neutral hiding place. In the face of the misery and death Washington, Wall Street and the Pentagon seek to impose on the world, Cuba represents the most advanced post of human civilization. Its revolution is the property of all those who fight. The stakes are that high, the "future of the country as a nation," as Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque stated on April 9.
The former "friends of Cuba" have crossed the Rubicon. To the timeless question of the labor movement, "which side are you on?" they reply, the boss of all bosses.
Washington has called and they have answered. To them, the White House says, "welcome aboard, better late than never."
History will again absolve Cuba, but will not be so kind to those who, withering under fire, abandon it.
Jon Hillson, a Los Angeles airline worker and member of the International Association of Machinists, is a coordinator of the Los Angeles Coalition in Solidarity with Cuba. He has helped organize a series of recent public meetings in defense of Cuban sovereignty. These are his personal opinions.
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