Progressive Cuba-Bashing - Democratic Underground

durutti

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Sat Aug-06-05 12:17 AM
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Progressive Cuba-Bashing

Edited on Sat Aug-06-05 12:18 AM by durutti

http://www.marxmail.org/Cuba_Levins.htm

In the mid-1960s, when Che Guevara dropped out of sight to begin his guerrilla campaign in Bolivia, some on the left were asking whether Fidel had had him murdered. In the late 1980s, some were quick to assume that the trial of the Cuban general Ochoa on charges of attempting to organize a drug ring in collaboration with the Medellín cartel was really a political purge. What is striking is that these accusations against Cuba were accepted by so many without investigation, as if the abuses that were alleged were only to be expected and therefore must be true.

Why are so many progressives and liberals taken in by even the most outrageous falsehoods about Cuba? Why do they often accept uncritically the line of the Miami and Washington reactionaries about Cuba when they doubt almost everything else from these sources? Possibly some are tired of nay-saying all the conventional wisdoms. They do not want to appear "hard-line" or "ideological," and rejecting Cuba is a cheap and easy way of being a little more mainstream. Cuba may be relegated by some to the list of youthful enthusiasms from the time when "we thought we could change the world." This stance is reinforced by the accumulated cynicism of many defeats that says that no place can be all that good, that all dreams come to naught. Or, perhaps since Cuba's socialism is one of the few to have survived, it has become harder to romanticize it.

But, mostly, this vulnerability of the left to rightist propaganda is derived from the discouraging experience of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe and the unwarranted assumption that Cuba has a similar regime. As well, too many progressives have accepted cold-war anti-communism assumptions: that all Reds are the same and that any accusation against any of them is probably an understatement, that they support good causes only to serve their own noxious ends, that revolutionaries once in power are all cynical manipulators and monopolizers of privilege, and that their public statements are merely propaganda. The burdens of internalized cold war anti-communism and conventional political science allow for careless judgments and casual denunciations.

Dismissal of Cuba is sometimes simply an off-handed remark in writings about other subjects. For example Marc Cooper wrote a piece in The Nation, "Remembering Allende" (9/29/03). It was a thoughtful commentary, reflecting real experience, knowledge, and sympathy for the Chilean struggle. But in the course of it he threw in a careless unsupported denunciation of Cuba, referring to "the wholesale jailing of dissidents and summary executions by an ossified and dictatorial Cuban state." He is of course free to disapprove of the trials of political de-stabilizers in April 2003. But by linking the execution of hijackers to the trials of the "dissidents," he makes it appear as if dissidents were executed. In fact the hijackers were not political people. Two of them had prior criminal records, and they were threatening to kill their hostages. Most of us oppose capital punishment and support worldwide calls to eliminate it, but this does not justify singling out this case as an example of Cuban depravity.

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