Fidel: "The Cuban model doesn't work for us anymore"

by Joel Wendland

Inspired by a new article at People's World on Fidel Castro's first major public appearance in about four years, I am now catching up on my reading of Jeffrey Goldberg's recent trip to Cuba where he met with former President Fidel Castro over a three day period. In addition to talking about Middle East politics and anti-Semitism, Castro expressed to Goldberg some regrets about his role in the Cuban missile crisis.

Here is some of Goldberg's account:

There were many odd things about my recent Havana stopover (apart from the dolphin show, which I'll get to shortly), but one of the most unusual was Fidel Castro's level of self-reflection. I only have limited experience with Communist autocrats (I have more experience with non-Communist autocrats) but it seemed truly striking that Castro was willing to admit that he misplayed his hand at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis (you can read about what he said toward the end of my previous post - but he said, in so many words, that he regrets asking Khruschev to nuke the U.S.).

Goldberg then turned to the question of socialism in Cuba:

Even more striking was something he said at lunch on the day of our first meeting. We were seated around a smallish table; Castro, his wife, Dalia, his son; Antonio; Randy Alonso, a major figure in the government-run media; and Julia Sweig, the friend I brought with me to make sure, among other things, that I didn't say anything too stupid (Julia is a leading Latin American scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations). I initially was mainly interested in watching Fidel eat - it was a combination of digestive problems that conspired to nearly kill him, and so I thought I would do a bit of gastrointestinal Kremlinology and keep a careful eye on what he took in (for the record, he ingested small amounts of fish and salad, and quite a bit of bread dipped in olive oil, as well as a glass of red wine). But during the generally lighthearted conversation (we had just spent three hours talking about Iran and the Middle East), I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.

Fidel's response:

"The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," he said.

Goldberg did a double take:

This struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments. Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, "Never mind"?

I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, "He wasn't rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under 'the Cuban model' the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country."

Julia pointed out that one effect of such a sentiment might be to create space for his brother, Raul, who is now president, to enact the necessary reforms in the face of what will surely be push-back from orthodox communists within the Party and the bureaucracy. Raul Castro is already loosening the state's hold on the economy. He recently announced, in fact, that small businesses can now operate and that foreign investors could now buy Cuban real estate. (The joke of this new announcement, of course, is that Americans are not allowed to invest in Cuba, not because of Cuban policy, but because of American policy. In other words, Cuba is beginning to adopt the sort of economic ideas that America has long-demanded it adopt, but Americans are not allowed to participate in this free-market experiment because of our government's hypocritical and stupidly self-defeating embargo policy. We'll regret this, of course, when Cubans partner with Europeans and Brazilians to buy up all the best hotels).

And then they all went to see the dolphins at Havana's aquarium.

Fidel discusses anti-Semitism and nukes

This new post by The Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg about his recent conversation with former Cuban President Fidel Castro is very interesting. Here are the first couple of paragraphs:

A couple of weeks ago, while I was on vacation, my cell phone rang; it was Jorge Bolanos, the head of the Cuban Interest Section (we of course don't have diplomatic relations with Cuba) in Washington. "I have a message for you from Fidel," he said. This made me sit up straight. "He has read your Atlantic article about Iran and Israel. He invites you to Havana on Sunday to discuss the article." I am always eager, of course, to interact with readers of The Atlantic, so I called a friend at the Council on Foreign Relations, Julia Sweig, who is a preeminent expert on Cuba and Latin America: "Road trip," I said.

I quickly departed the People's Republic of Martha's Vineyard for Fidel's more tropical socialist island paradise. Despite the self-defeating American ban on travel to Cuba, both Julia and I, as journalists and researchers, qualified for a State Department exemption. The charter flight from Miami was bursting with Cuban-Americans carrying flat-screen televisions and computers for their technologically-bereft families. Fifty minutes after take-off, we arrived at the mostly-empty Jose Marti International Airport. Fidel's people met us on the tarmac (despite giving up his formal role as commandante en jefe after falling ill several years ago, Fidel still has many people). We were soon deposited at a "protocol house" in a government compound whose architecture reminded me of the gated communities of Boca Raton. The only other guest in this vast enclosure was the president of Guinea-Bissau.

On anti-Semitism, Goldberg recorded Castro's thoughts this way:

Castro's message to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, was not so abstract, however. Over the course of this first, five-hour discussion, Castro repeatedly returned to his excoriation of anti-Semitism. He criticized Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust and explained why the Iranian government would better serve the cause of peace by acknowledging the "unique" history of anti-Semitism and trying to understand why Israelis fear for their existence.

He began this discussion by describing his own, first encounters with anti-Semitism, as a small boy. "I remember when I was a boy - a long time ago - when I was five or six years old and I lived in the countryside," he said, "and I remember Good Friday. What was the atmosphere a child breathed? 'Be quiet, God is dead.' God died every year between Thursday and Saturday of Holy Week, and it made a profound impression on everyone. What happened? They would say, `The Jews killed God.' They blamed the Jews for killing God! Do you realize this?"

He went on, "Well, I didn't know what a Jew was. I knew of a bird that was a called a 'Jew,' and so for me the Jews were those birds. These birds had big noses. I don't even know why they were called that. That's what I remember. This is how ignorant the entire population was."

He said the Iranian government should understand the consequences of theological anti-Semitism. "This went on for maybe two thousand years," he said. "I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything." The Iranian government should understand that the Jews "were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God. In my judgment here's what happened to them: Reverse selection. What's reverse selection? Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms. One might have assumed that they would have disappeared; I think their culture and religion kept them together as a nation." He continued: "The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust." I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me. "I am saying this so you can communicate it," he answered.

Read Goldberg's piece here

Bush Denounces the "Ruling Class" of Cuba!

By Norman Markowitz

George Bush has just made a speech denouncing socialist Cuba as a "dying order," a "totalitarian" house of horrors, and looking forward to the coming "victory" of the "democratic movement," the dissidents of today, who should remember whom their friends were (namely the old Bay of Pigs crowd in Washington). Bush also called for an "international fund" to help Cuba establish a "free market society" aka a capitalist economy which will be at the beginning subsidized by foreign investors the way that Pinochet's brutal fascist regime, which overthrow the socialist government of Salvador Allende (which by no means had at the time of the counter-revolution built a socialist society, as Cuba has today).

The UN General Assembly is going to vote soon on Cuba's resolution to end the U.S. embargo against Cuba, which has existed since 1960. The resolution has been passed with large majorities in recent years and the U.S. government has ignored it in a cavalier fashion. The Bush comments today are clear evidence that his administration is launching a preemptive strike against the resolution, which will no doubt pass with a substantial majority again.

Americans of all political persuasions willing to listen should know something about the history of Cuban-American relations. Cuba was a slave colony of the Spanish empire which some from slavery elements dreamed of annexing to the U.S. before the Civil War. The U.S. intervened in Cuba's war of independence against the Spanish Empire ostensibly to liberate Cuba ("Cuba libre" was the cry, and it lived on so to speak in the mixed drink of rum and coca cola by the same name). But the U.S. kept its army of occupation in Cuba until the Cubans wrote into their constitution a clause giving the U.S. the right to intervene in order to preserve Cuban independence(which meant the U.S. could intervene as it saw fit) U.S. governments then served U.S. companies in turning the island into a semi-colony and supporting brutal dictatorial regimes for the next sixty years.

When Fidel Castro refused to knuckle under to the Eisenhower administration in 1960, took the revolution in a socialist direction, and turned to the Soviet Union for assistance, the embargo was enacted followed by the failed CIA organized Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which almost led to a nuclear World War III between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were no invasions of Cuba, but CIA directed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and acts of sabotage against the Cuban economy continued for many years (one is not certain that they have completely ended today).

Cuba has survived. It has established in the context of a state of siege a society that is qualitative more advanced than the one that the revolution inherited in 1959. Its achievements, given the social circumstances that it has faced, are well beyond what any nation in Latin America has achieved (and in terms of equal rights and equal treatment in regard to education and health care, along with other basic human needs, beyond what the U.S. has in reality achieved for all of its people).For thirty years the rationale for the embargo against Cuba was its relationship with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union ceased to exist nearly sixteen years ago, yet the embargo if anything becomes more repressive. Since U.S. capitalist domination of Cuba began nearly two decades before the Russian revolution and essentially ended thanks to Soviet aid to the Cuban revolution, there is no reason to continue this blockade, except hatred by the U.S. ruling class both of any state that dares to establish socialism and also, in Cuba's case, a former de facto colony that dared take back its sugar plantations, mills, and casinos from their U.S. owners.

"For Cuba's ruling class," Bush said, "its grip on power is more important than the welfare of its people." If ever there was an example of Freud's principle of projection, that is, ascribing to someone you see as an enemy what you yourself are either doing or want to do and then using that as a rationale for your aggressive thoughts or actions, that statement certainly is it. "Life will not improve for the Cubans under their current system of government,"Bush went on to say (another example of projection). But life would certainly not improve for the majority of Cubans if the austere and egalitarian socialism that they have created would be replaced by a restoration of capitalism, one in which the the casinos and the bordellos of Havana would live again, sharp class divisions would become apparent through the society, and a new Cuban class of compradors serving the interests of the U.S. and other foreign investors would spring up as the majority of Cubans looked on, unwelcome "visitors" in their own country. This is Bush's prescription for "Cuban freedom" aka counter revolution.

Taking Freud's principle of projection and throwing it back at Bush, one might say that "For the U.S. ruling class, its grip on power is more important than the welfare of its people." One might might also say that "life will not improve for the Americans under the current corrupt political system, where corporations and the rich spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy politicians and the Republican Party undermines basic democratic rights at home and advances militarism and war abroad."

Ending the blockade against Cuba should be a matter of conscience for Americans, given what successive U.S. government have done to Cuba and its people starting long before the Cuban revolution. It would also gain respect for the U.S. in the United Nations and in the larger world community, a respect that the Bush administration has done more to undermine than any administration in modern U.S. history.

Something's Gotta Give: Will the World Unite Against the US?

Only an alliance of civilizations could oppose the United States’ empire: the Russian civilization whose orbit includes the Community of Independent States (CIS); the Chinese, the Indian, the Islamic and the Latin American civilizations. A "reflection" by Fidel Castro...

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