Jackson, "The Cuba Question"

There is no denying that the 1959 Cuban Revolution was in many ways a watershed event in Latin American history. Following upon the 1954 American intervention to depose Guatemala’s elected government, Castro’s rise to power prompted a full-scale return to US gunboat diplomacy throughout Latin America, a generation in which the US Southern Command, the CIA and graduates of the School of the Americas ran roughshod over the region.

Except for Cuba, which smashed the US proxy invaders on Playa Girón, then held out for decades against relentless American diplomatic, economic and terrorist pressures.

But quite frankly, I am weary of the prominence that “The Cuba Question” gets in Latin American affairs. I’m sick of it, both in its leftist and rightist manifestations.

How dare the Miami Cuban exile leadership demand that Panama tolerate an attempt at the mass murder of Panamanians, so that a gang of reactionary old buzzards might take out Fidel Castro, in the hope that Cuba’s left-wing dictatorship might be replaced by a right-wing one?

That’s exactly what the recent flap about the pardons of Luis Posada Carriles et al is about. Those men intended to set off an explosion at the University of Panama’s main auditorium, a blast that would have leveled a couple of city blocks, including the nearby Arnulfo Arias Hospital Complex. Hundreds of Panamanians would have died for an alien cause.

And what alien cause? The cause of a US government subsidized Miami exile leadership, of people who think that because their grandparents owned Coca-Cola bottling franchises and rum distilleries and public utilities during the old days of the Batista dictatorship, that gives them the right to own and operate Cuba as their private fiefdom in the future.

Make no mistake about it. There is nothing the least bit democratic about the Cuban American National Foundation or its terrorist auxiliary from whence Posada Carriles and company come. These people are bloodthirsty totalitarians, people who have attacked innocent civilians across the Americas, people who have set off deadly bombs in New York airport terminals and on the streets of Washington DC, people who hired themselves out to Richard Nixon when he was subverting American democracy and to Augusto Pinochet when he was exporting Chilean assassination, people who were the expert consultants when Ollie North and the US Southern Command were organizing death squad terror across Central America.

These were also, in large part, the people behind the scurrilous 1994 smear campaign against the Panamanian presidential campaign of Rubén Blades. Why? Because Blades is the son of a Cuban mother, but not the tool of the Miami Cuban exile leadership.

Sadly, these are also the people who dominate US policy toward all of Latin America.

They habitually smear all Latin American leaders to the left of themselves by equating them with Fidel Castro, even when the comparisons are patently ridiculous.

Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez has won several free elections in a row, fair and square. He has allowed an opposition yellow press to continue its campaign against him and largely refrained from jailing those who attempted a coup against him, and yet we keep hearing from the Cuban exiles that he’s turning his country into a Castro-style dictatorship. It would be funny, except that the Bush administration has adopted this absurdity as official US policy.

Now we're beginning to hear a variation of this mantra from Miami directed at Brazil and its President Lula da Silva, much as we heard it about Chile in the run-up to the September 11, 1973 Nixon-Pinochet coup in which President Salvador Allende and so many others were assassinated.

It’s high time that the United States government ditched this gang of fanatics and started treating the different peoples and governments of Latin America on their own merits, viewing them --- and us --- without the distorting Cuban exile lens.

But if the exiles’ influence on US policy is regrettable, so is the uncritical adulation that Fidel Castro gets from much of the left in Panama and around the Americas.

Sure, a lot of Panamanians, most of whom reject Cuban-style communism as a model of how we should manage our affairs, admire Castro for holding out against US pressure for all these years. That I can understand.

But do the campus radicals and our most militant labor leaders really want a society without a free press? Do they want our newspapers to look like Granma, full of posed photos of dignitaries standing together but bereft of serious discussion of the issues facing the nation? Do they want to drive out not only the oligarchic press barons, but also the free-thinking chroniclers of The Revolution, as Fidel’s crowd did to their own Carlos Franqui?

Does the Panamanian left really want to stifle the arts? Would they follow in Castro’s footsteps and persecute some of the most talented creative people on the progressive end of the political spectrum, just because they happen to be homosexuals?

Does the Panamanian left really want to stigmatize our best athletes? Would they brand Mariano Rivera, and every other world-class athlete who leaves this country in order to be able to compete on the highest level, as a “defector,” as a disloyal person with a despicable character flaw? Sure, we could learn a lot from the way that the Cuban educational system turns out so many fine athletes, but just as surely we shouldn’t mistreat the sporting elite in the way that Castro’s government does.

Yes, there is a sliver of a splinter in this society that worships a pantheon of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin (sometimes explicitly, usually not) and Fidel. Quite frequently the Cuban revolution is represented through the icon of Che Guevara rather than Fidel himself, usually without acknowledgment that the two men had their political differences and their falling out. An alternative lineup that includes Chairman Mao doesn’t seem to have a following here, but the other alternative, the one that replaces Stalin with Trotsky and takes an ambiguous position on Fidel, does have a few Panamanian adherents. In any case, I don’t think that this Church of the Correct Line is very representative of the Panamanian left. In leftist circles here the devotees of the Marxist-Leninist Pantheon are surely outnumbered by the Catholics.

Shall we put the argument about models and symbols of The Revolution in terms of Marxist theory and Hegelian dialectics?

As a matter of hard-nosed historical materialism, it can be observed that, just as the fall of the Berlin Wall meant neither “the end of ideology” nor the “end of history,” the assumption of power by a communist party is not the end of the dialectic, either in the country where it happens or in the world.

Lenin’s thesis --- which was a peculiarly Russian one, the product of Czarist tyranny --- gave rise to its antitheses, and nearly a century of struggles between those poles has passed. Capitalism isn’t what it used to be, and its opponents do themselves a great disservice by adopting the symbols and political formulae of their great-grandparents’ generation.

Nor is Latin America today unchanged from what it was when Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. Back then, for example, Panama may have been better educated and more industrialized than most other Latin American countries, but most of our population was rural and most of our land mass was covered with forests. Today most Panamanians live in the cities, above all in the Panama City - San Miguelito metro area. The Colon province jungle where I played as a kid has given way to urban sprawl. Fidel Castro’s 1950s agrarian revolution is ever less relevant to contemporary Panama’s social and physical realities.

For decades we have seen Fidel’s guerrilla thesis, as well as its counterinsurgency antithesis, play itself out on the canvas of Latin American history. Now it’s time to sum up, take stock of changes, and come up with a compelling synthesis, to put it in Hegelian terminology.

The substitution of a radical iconography for this thought process is the height of intellectual laziness. It’s so much easier to meditate upon a distorted caricature of someone else’s revolution than to invest the thought and labor needed to transform what is now a marginalized protest movement into a viable political option for the Panamanian people. To the extent that this facile attitude prevails at Panama’s national university, it’s a symptom of the country’s underdevelopment.

The Cuban Revolution is a matter of historical fact, and as Fidel Castro still holds power in Cuba, the Panamanian government ought to maintain normal diplomatic and economic relations with his. But the old man should not be the guest of honor at our university campuses, and a dictatorship like his should not be the goal to which any progressive movement aspires.

Also in this section:
Jackson, Sick of "The Cuba Question"
What they're saying about the attacks on Bush's military record
Avnery, "God Wills It!"
Committee to Protect Journalists, Journalists behind Cuban bars
Reporters Without Borders, Concern for a slain Venezuelan colleague
Greenpeace, Multinational logger threatens libel suit
Lynn, A bad piece of fruit from Mireya's banana republic
Kolker, Honduran anti-gang law makes things worse
Leis, The Ethical Coalition
Bernal, For the children of Beslan

opinion

Put Cuba in its proper perspective