December 24, 2008: Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008

[Judi Lynn]

December 24, 2008

Then and Now
Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008
By SAUL LANDAU

Watching Hugo Chavez orate on Venezuelan television rings old memory bells. “Socialism. Revolution, Patria.” Words I heard in 1960-61 in Cuba.

Now, almost half a century later, in Venezuela’s 5 million plus capital, I watched the local residents cheering and waving flags, a scene that looked almost identical to what I remembered in Havana when Fidel Castro launched his marathon exercises in exciting rhetoric.

Like his Cuban mentor, Chavez offered examples of how “imperialism” -- his word for the United States -- had violated sovereignty, by backing the unsuccessful 2002 military coup against him and how Washington interfered in the internal affairs of smaller countries.

What a difference the decades make! In the early 1960s, the CIA (using Cuban exiles) assassinated Cuban teachers and militia members, and sabotaged Cuban installations. I remember hearing explosions, shots, and screams from the street.

From May through October 1960, I heard Fidel speak frequently to large crowds. He had become what Lee Lockwood called “Cuba’s living newspaper.” (Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel, 1967)

Almost fifty years later, Fidel’s ideological son attempts to apply some of his mentor’s rhetoric towards similar goals: to build a socialist society in a nation where oil has helped produce a capitalist mode of thinking and doing (shopping), a large wealthy class and a much larger mass of poor people.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/landau12242008.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. More from this article:

~snip~
Human rights in the United States have shrunk. In 1945, the U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg explained that waging aggressive war was permanently outlawed. In 2003, George W. Bush waged aggressive war in Iraq. In the post World War II era, torture became a crime against humanity. In the 21st Century, Bush reauthorized it. Waterboarding became associated with U.S. jailors at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba. European allies cooperated with the United States in secretly transporting people to torture centers in other places as well.

Meanwhile, Chavez, attacked by Washington for being antidemocratic, has expanded the breadth of human rights for Venezuelans. They now enjoy more health-care, women have gained greater equality, more poor people have learned to read and have access to potable water.

These accomplishments coincide with the spirit of the 1948 UN Declaration on Human Rights. It seems as if the U.S. government has forgotten the goal and uses only the words as an instrument of policy to attack its enemies while it violates the letter and spirit of the very human rights laws U.S. lawyers helped to establish.

http://www.counterpunch.org/landau12242008.html

[amyrose2712]

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