"Progressives" Should Think Twice About Piling Onto Cuba

"Progressives" Should Think Twice
About Piling Onto Cuba
by Emile Schepers, in Chicago

The jailing of 75 hangers-on of the US diplomatic mission in
Cuba, and the only tangentially related execution of three
violent criminals who hijacked a ferryboat, have produced
howls of glee from the right, and of anguish from some who
either really are, or at any rate consider themselves to be,
people of the left.

The right wing response is predictable as it is nauseating.
It partakes of the Goebbels tactic of the "big lie". For
example, this past week president Batlle of Uruguay accused
Cuba of executing people merely for wanting to leave the
island. Not only is this wildly untrue and slanderous, but
also reveals attitudes of people of his ilk.

You can leave Cuba if you so desire, but if, as is usually
the case, your destination is Miami, you first have to get a
US visa. This is something that the United States
demanded, and Cuba acceded to. By mutual agreement between
the two countries, 20,000 US visas are supposed to be given
out in Cuba each year. However, in the past year, the US
State Department has only given out 700 or so, a fact that
Cuba has strongly protested. Cuba wants most people who
wish to emigrate to be able to do so, but the United States
is thwarting this. So who is not letting people emigrate
from Cuba to the United States is not Cuba, but the United
States.

There are exceptions: If you are a medical doctor and got
your training free from the Cuban university system, you are
required to put in some years of community service before
you are allowed to emigrate. This is the same everywhere.
Try to permanently leave the United States if you owe taxes
or college loan money; you will be stopped at the airport.
I know people to whom precisely this has befallen. When
there was a military draft, tens of thousands of young US
men were criminalized because they left the country rather
than go to Vietnam. Had any of them tried to come back,
they would have been jailed.

Some people in Cuba, no doubt, are discouraged by the fact
that the US Interests Section in Havana won't give them a
visa, and give up their plans to leave. Others hook up with
immigrant smugglers. Not too many patch together
improvised rafts any more, because the Cuban authorities
prevent this, patrolling the beaches and inlets. A tiny
few go to the extreme of hijacking boats or airplanes. The
ferry hijacking in question was a particularly ugly incident
in which the hijackers took over a regular coastal commuter
ferry by holding a knife to the throat of a female passenger
and threatening to kill her, then taking the boat out onto
the open sea where ocean swells could have swamped it and
killed everyone on board had it not run out of fuel. The
passengers finally had to jump overboard and swim to safety
to escape the violent hijackers, who were then arrested.
This whole incident was recorded in graphic detail by TV
news cameras. There were about ten hijackers, and only the
ringleaders were sentenced to death and executed.

So what Batlle is complaining about is that Cuba punishes
people, not for leaving Cuba, but for hijacking boats and
airplanes. This is true. Would he have it otherwise?
After our own experience of 9-11, we should be more ready to
understand Cuba's attitude about this. In the last few
months, there have been seven such hijackings, including one
in which a passenger airplane was hijacked and flown to the
US, creating the danger that US air defenses could have shot
it down fearing a terrorist attack, killing everyone on
board. The sharp punishment given to the ferry hijackers is
evidently a reaction, not to an isolated incident, but to a
pattern that is so marked that it raises suspicions of
coordination by the CIA or other US agencies of
destabilization. It would not be the first time that such
things happened in Cuba.

Hijacking is not nice. It is akin to terrorism, which I
thought everyone was against. People who hijack airplanes
and ships full of innocent people should be severely
punished.

As to the dissidents who got stiff prison terms: The
propaganda spin this side of the Florida Straits is that
these people are punished for having and expressing
anti-Castro positions, or simply for being "dissidents". In
fact, some of the most prominent dissidents in Cuba were not
arrested and most likely will not be. To name just two,
Osvaldo Paya and Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz are mouthing
off as usual, from Cuba, to the foreign press. The Cuban
government said in the indictments and in the prosecution's
evidence presented in the trial that the people arrested had
been conspiring with the US government to destabilize Cuba,
and that some of them had received material contributions
from the US government to enable them to do so.

There are two reactions to this from people who are
complaining: Some imply that the Cuban government's case was
a lie, but why should they assume this? The Cuban government
is noted among governments of the world for flat-out stating
its views on such matters, with apologies to nobody.
Further, we know from open, public records in the United
States that the United States government has been spending
tens of millions of dollars of our taxpayer money to
subsidize dissident activity in Cuba. The US administration
has openly and repeatedly stated that this money is designed
to support those in Cuba who are working for
"democratization" of the island. That money must eventually
end up in somebody's hands in Cuba, so why so much
difficulty in believing that the dissidents who are accused
of receiving it, actually received it?

The second reaction is to say that even if these things were
going on, even if the right-wing dissidents were receiving
this money, there is nothing wrong with this and it should
not be punished by the Cuban government. The fact is that
this flies in the face of reality; no government operates
that way. Cuba has been the target of a 43 year campaign
of often violent subversion and destabilization by the
United States, and the Cuban government has both the right
and the responsibility to defend its people against this
campaign, which has cost thousands of innocent Cuban lives
over the years. The US campaign against Cuba needs
patsies and traitors within the island to succeed, so the
Cuban government is more than justified in cracking down on
these accomplices.

And another dimension of the lack of realism is the idea
that only Cuba does these things. In fact, the Cuban law
is designed to prevent Cuban citizens from aiding the
vicious 43 year US economic blockade of the island. It is
specifically illegal for Cubans to connive in that blockade,
because such activity is seen as harming the national
economy and thus, the well-being of the Cuban people. Every
country has laws that severely punish you for activities
that harm the economy. We have them in the United States
too: Laws against price-fixing, against insider trading on
the stock market, and against certain kinds of international
currency transactions. People have been jailed for these
things, though if you are Ken Lay you get away with a slap
on the wrist--something that 99% of the American people
consider inadequate. The right wing thinks that the United
States should be allowed to have such laws and jail people
for violating them, but Cuba should not be able to prohibit
and punish functionally equivalent behavior. This is
typical of the double standard applied to Cuba.

Now, to the progressives. Some of them take the attitude
that the Cuban government should allow absolute freedom of
speech and association, and that (by implication) this
should also include the right to engage in joint planning
with reactionary US diplomats, and the receipt of money and
other resources from the US as well. They recognize, in
some cases, that the US has no good intentions toward Cuba,
that the dissidents are muddled at best and reactionary at
worst, that if they ever got in control of the Cuban
government things would go badly for the Cuban people, but
they still think that nobody should ever be stopped from
doing what they like, here , in Cuba, or anywhere. Their
idea of a socialist society, or a humane society of the
future, requires not only a perfectly harmonious community,
but absolute individual freedom as well.

This is unrealistic. It posits a platonic ideal of what a
human society should be like (or, in some cases, what
socialism should be like), then measures Cuba at the current
extremely difficult historical moment (with George Bush on
the rampage all over the place) against this artificial
standard, and finds that Cuba comes up wanting. This is a
reflection of idealistic thinking which characterizes some
of the other thought of some of these individuals (Chomsky,
for example). In several cases, it reflects
anarcho-libertarian thinking that is not rooted in political
reality (Chomsky again, and Howard Zinn). It fails to
understand that the development of any human society is a
specific, material phenomenon, and that all human societies
are, and will always be, "works in progress".

What if this had been the attitude of the US government
during World War II? Would it have been correct to permit US
citizens and residents the absolute freedom to meet with
German and Japanese agents to plot the undermining of the US
economy--in the name of freedom of speech and association?

In that war, the Roosevelt administration erred when it
arrested Japanese- Americans merely for being
Japanese-Americans. It should, also, have submitted
accused Axis spies to a normal trial instead of a special
military tribunal, to avoid punishing the innocent. But
when it restricted the activities of provable Axis
sympathizers, it was not only within its rights but was
exercising its responsibility to the American people. Japan
had attacked the United States, and then Germany and Italy
had declared war, so to allow total freedom to Axis
sympathizers in the United States to meet with German and
Japanese agents would have been utter folly.

And the actions of the United States government toward Cuba
are as close to a war situation as you can get, without a
war actually having broken out. The statements of some of
the dissidents also make clear that in at least those cases,
they were working to damage Cuba's trade with the outside
world, and were being encouraged to do that by the United
States. This is illegal in Cuba and, in my opinion, should
be.

The issue of the death penalty comes up in this context. I
am actively involved in the anti-death penalty movement in
the United States. If I were to wake up tomorrow and hear
on the morning news that the Cuban National People's Power
Assembly has decided to abolish the death penalty, it would
make me very happy. This is not because of pacifist
sentiments, for I am not a pacifist. Rather, Cuba's
abolishing the death penalty would make it easier for me and
others to fight against the death penalty here and
worldwide. But this is a Cuban decision, that will be
made in the context of what is happening in Cuba.

Still, I recognize the importance of the issue of the death
penalty, and the right of those who have a principled
position on this to express their disagreement with its
employment in Cuba. But let's have context here also.

Cuba may have as many as a few dozen people on death row, in
a population of 11 million (Cuba has many fewer people in
jail than the United States does, by the way, taking
population into consideration). The death penalty is only
sparingly used. Before these latest executions, it had not
been employed in several years, according to reliable
sources. However, in his last full calendar year as
governor of Texas (2000) , George Bush signed off on 40
executions (Texas has about twice as many people as Cuba
does).

In the United States, the death penalty is far more
frequently used than in Cuba, proportional, as always, to
the population, and its use is plagued by such scandal that
last year the Republican governor of Illinois let more than
150 people off death row because, as he rightly said, the
system was so corrupt and biased (against poor and minority
people) that there was no way of ensuring that the innocent
have not already been executed. The new (Democratic)
attorney general of Illinois has tried to reverse Governor
Ryan's decision for some of the cases, and put people back
on death row.

And when President Bush is asked about the death penalty, he
shakes his shoulders and chuckles, just as he does when he
is talking about bombing Iraq.

Besides philosophical idealism leading to perfectionistic
expectations of Cuba, some of the "progressives" who have
joined in this campaign reveal a shocking degree of
ignorance both of history and of the world around them.

Even though they have opposed things like the Iraq war, on
the question of imperialism and its tactics in general, they
are like babes in the woods. They evidently do not know that
the Bush administration has appointed ultra-rightists to all
the Latin America positions in the State Department, and
that the head man there for Latin America is a far-right
Cuban exile who has all but sworn to bring about regime
change in Havana, by fair means or foul.

They do not know that about this time last year, President
Bush broke bread in a South Florida political visit with
people known to have committed terrorist acts against
Cuba--people who are among the closest political associates
of the President's brother Jeb. They are not aware that
the US government has spent tens of millions of dollars in
taxpayer money every year to finance the dissidents in Cuba,
even though this is open, public information, right in the
US budget. They don't know about the bombings carried out
in Cuba by agents controlled by the Miami exile
organizations.

They haven't heard about the airliner bombing in 1976 which
killed 72 innocent Cubans and others, and that the people
who did it were all trained by the CIA and that the main
leader of the attack was pardoned by George Bush senior, and
ate soup in the same meeting with Bush Junior as recently as
last year.

Nor do they seem to be aware that agents of this network
went to Panama a year and a half ago with the purpose of
blowing up the University of Panama with a bomb while Castro
was speaking there, no doubt killing hundreds of students in
the process had they succeeded. (How is that different from
9-11, by the way?)

So when they hear that the Cuban government has pounced on a
group of dissidents for plotting with the US to destabilize
Cuba and harm the Cuban people, they think it is all a
myth.

If they even remember that last year, US Assistant Secretary
of Defense Bolton started a campaign to claim that Cuba had
"weapons of mass destruction", they are not alarmed by the
lie. The fact that the invasion of Iraq was justified
precisely by lies about such weapons does not connect in
their minds with Bolton's accusations. If they are aware of
all the hijacking incidents of the last couple of months,
they must think it is just a big coincidence, nothing to be
alarmed about. Though taking progressive positions on
other issues, they are all too ready to believe right wing
propaganda on the Cuba situation.

And why Cuba? There are 192 sovereign, independent states
in the world, including the Vatican and SMOM. A great many
of these have highly repressive regimes, as well as being
characterized by vicious class and race inequality. Why
would progressive people go through the whole list of 192,
and pick on Cuba as a focus of their indignation? Here, I
think, you see the subtle working of the right wing
propaganda and brainwashing machinery, even on the minds of
progressives and some leftists. We are told over and over
again how bad Cuba is, and some of us internalize that
information in spite of its lying, reactionary provenience.
We should know better, but not all of us do. We heard
something somewhere about how dissent is not tolerated in
Cuba, or how there are no elections, or how people are not
allowed to leave, and we believe it without realizing that
it is just part of the long term propaganda campaign of lies
against the Cuban Revolution, and against the Cuban people.
As I say, we should know better, but we're not perfect
either.

No, I am not claiming that the Cuban government never makes
a mistake. All I know is that Cuba is in the cross-hairs
of imperialism right now, and anybody who considers
themselves progressive should understand that the priority
should be to defend Cuba against this mounting attack. The
way certain really or ostensibly progressive people have
piled onto Cuba in the past week serves the purposes of
imperialism, whether they realize it or not.