Why confuse Cuba with hell?
TadaiAe..
"This was the time when Vasco Nuñez of Balboa, Cortez and Pizarro planted the Castilian flag on the Darian Coast, in Mexico and in Peru, when Spanish influence was predominant throughout Europe and their southern imagination dazzled the eyes of the Iberians with
WE reproduce below an article by the Uruguayan writer visions of Eldorado, chivalrous adventures and world domination. At that time Spani-
Eduardo Galeano, author of The Open Veins of Latin sh liberty disappeared beneath the rattling
America, which was published in the Bolivian newspaper of arms, under a rain of gold and lit by the
Aqui on April 24, 1992. Galeano, who is by no means terrible light of the autodatés...
uncritical of the Cuban regime, replies to those who wish to
"How can we explain the fact that cenput an end to the revolution and who justify the UStralization never took root in a country where, earlier than in all the other feudal sponsored blockade against the island which has been in states, the absolutist monarchy established force for the past thirty years.
itself in the most brutal fashion? The answer is not hard to find. Everywhere the great monarchies took shape on the ruins of the warring feudal classes: the aristocracy and the cities. But, in the other great states of Europe, the monarchy appeared as a centre of civilization, the bearer of social unity.
"It was the laboratory where the various elements of society were mixed together and kneaded so that the towns were able to trade in their independence and local autonomy of the Middle Ages in exchange for the general supremacy of the bourgeoisie and the domination of bourgeois society.
In Spain, on the contrary, the aristocracy fell into the most profound abasement without losing the worst of their privileges, while the towns lost their former power without gaining a modern importance in its stead".7
Short-sighted genius
The political genius of the Catholic monarchs and the power of their descendants was from the long-term historical point of view undermined by a terrible short-sightedness.
The criminal expulsion of the Jews had disastrous effects in the immediate as well as the long term. The "Discovery" itself, meanwhile, cannot in itself be considered a crime, but its consequence in terms of invasion and conquest are a blackspot that has nothing legendary about it.
It can be said that the Spanish colonial metropolis paid for these crimes by more than three centuries of social, economic and political backwardness and that, in a perverse way, the stolen treasures of the
"West Indies" only briefly enriched the
Spanish parasites before serving to enrich the economy, and thus the bourgeoisie, of northern Europe.
Imperialist political geniuses beware! *
7. Karl Marx, op. cit. pp. 122-124.
ATIN America is no longer a threat. Therefore, it has ceased to exist. Karely do the universal factories of public opinion deign to throw us a glance. However,
Cuba, which threatens no one, is still a universal obsession. This little island, subject to a ferocious state of siege, condemned to extermination by hunger, refuses to give up. Because of national dignity? No, no, explain the experts: out of a suicidal vocation.
Coffin in hands, the undertakers wait.
A wait which irritates them.
In Eastern Europe, they did a speedy and thoroughgoing job, hired by the corpses themselves, and now they are anxious to inter this stubborn red dictatorship which refuses to accept its fate. The undertakers have already prepared the funeral reading. They will not say that the Cuban revolution is simply dead:
000 but that it is dead because that is what it wanted.
2. Among the most impatient, among the most furious, one finds the repentant. Yesterday, they confused Stalinism with socialism and today they must erase these traces of a regrettable past; the lies that they have told, the truths that they have killed. In the
New
World
Order, the
L.
bureaucrats become the champions of freedom of expression.
3. I have never confused Cuba with paradise. Why confuse it now with hell? I am among those who believe that one can love it without lying or remaining silent.
4. Fidel Castro is a symbol of national dignity. For Latin Americans, accustomed to five centuries of humiliation, he is a well-loved symbol.
But Fidel has, for a long time, been at the centre of a bureaucratic system: a system based on echoes of the monologues of the regime, which imposes the routine of obedience against creative energy; sooner or later, the bureaucratic single party, single truth system ends up in a divorce from reality.
In the period of tragic solitude which Cuba is suffering the all-powerful state reveals itself to be completely impotent.
5. This system did not fall from the sky. Above all, it emerged as a result of imperial veto. It appeared when the revolution had no other choice than to enclose itself to defend itself, obliged war by to wage those who forbade
Cuba from being
Cuba: and the incessant external harassment has consolidated it over the years thirty 21
For years now
June 8, 1992
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500th ANNIVERSARY / CUBA
International Viewpoint # 230 • June 8, 1992
CUBA the imperial veto has been applied, in a thousand ways, to prevent the realization of the project of the Sierra Maestra. A continuing hypocritical scandal; since then, Cuba has been obliged to take examinations in democracy before the fabricators of all the military dictatorships which previously existed in country. In Cuba, democracy and socialism were born as two names for the same thing; but the big power brokers of the world only gave it the freedom to choose between capitalism and capitalism.
6. The Eastern European model, which so easily collapsed there, is not the Cuban revolution. The Cuban revolution, which did not come from above, which was not imposed from outside, has grown from the people, and not against them or despite them. That is why it has been able to develop a collective consciousness of the nation: the indispensable self-respect which is the basis of self-determination.
7. The blockade of Haiti, announced with drums and trumpets in the name of sacred democracy, has been a transient spectacle. It has not lasted very long. It finished well before the return of Aristide. It could not last: under democracy or dictatorship, there are 50 US companies which benefit from cheap Haitian labour.
On the contrary, the blockade against Cuba has been strengthened through the years. A bilateral affair? That is what they say. But everybody knows that the US blockade implies, in the world today, a universal blockade. It also implies, even if there are many who ignore it, the negation of the right to self-determination.
The suffocating siege erected around 22 Cuba is a form of intervention, the most ferocious, the most efficient, in internal affairs. It leads to despair, it stimulates repression, it discourages freedom. And those who apply the blockade know this very well.
8. There is no longer a Soviet Union. One can no longer exchange, at a fair price, sugar against petrol.
Cuba is condemned to isolation. The blockade magnifies the cannibalism of the international market. In response, Cuba turns to tourism.
And the remedy could well turn out to be even worse than the cure. An everyday contradiction; the foreign tourists enjoy themselves, an island in the island, they have all that which the Cubans lack. Old wounds open up in the memory. There is a popular anger, a justified anger, in this country which had been colonized and had been a brothel, which had been a plaything.
A painful situation, without doubt. But who can throw the first stone? Are not the privileges of foreign tourism judged normal throughout Latin America? Worse still, is not the systematic war carried out against the poor also judged to be perfectly normal?
9. There are privileges in Cuba? Privileges of tourism and, to a certain extent, privileges of power. Undoubtedly. But the fact is that there exists no more egalitarian society in the whole of Latin America. Poverty is shared: there is no milk, it is true, but milk is not withheld from the children
Food is rare, there is no longer any soap, and the blockade cannot explain all these shortages in itself; but, in the midst of such a crisis, there are still schools and hospitals for all, which is difficult to conceive in a continent where for so many people the only school is the street, and the only doctor is death.
Poverty is shared, I said, and it shares itself. Cuba is still the most solidarity-inclined country in the world.
Recently, to give an example, Cuba has been the only country to open its doors to the Haitians fleeing from hunger and military dictatorship, who, on the other hand, have been expelled from the United States.
10. A time of upheavals and perplexity; a time of great doubts and few certainties.
But perhaps the element of certainty is not so small; when they are born from within, when they grow up from below, the great processes of change do not end up badly. Can Nicaragua, to cite one case, emerging from a decade of astonishing grandeur, forget what it has learned in the matter of dignity, justice and democracy? Will Sandinism end in some leaders who have kept their cars, houses and other public goods? It is certain that Sandinism amounts to very much more than these Sandinistas who were ready to sacrifice their lives in the war and who, in peace, have not been capable of sacrificing material things.
11. The Cuban revolution witnesses a growing tension between the energies for change which it contains and its petrified structures of power. The youth, and not only the youth, demand more than democracy. It is not a model imposed from outside, prefabricated by those who discredit democracy by using it as an alibi for social injustice and national humiliation.
The real, and not formal, expression of the popular will wishes to find its own road. A Cuban road. From inside, from below. But the full liberation of these energies for change does not seem possible as long as Cuba is subject to a state of siege. Foreign harassment feeds the worst tendencies of the regime: those which interpret any contradiction as a possible act of conspiracy, and not as a simple proof that life is living.
12. Cuba is judged as if it had not suffered, for more than 30 years, a continuous state of emergency. It is a cunning enemy, undoubtedly, which condemns the consequences of its own
I am against the death penalty. Everywhere. In Cuba also. But, can one repudiate the executions without repudiating, at the same time, the siege which denies Cuba the liberty to elect and obliges it to live in uncertainty?
Yes, one can. Cuba is receiving lessons in human rights from those who look aside when the death penalty is applied elsewhere in Latin America. And applied not occasionally, but in a systematic fashion: in frying Black people on the electric chairs of the United States, in massacring Indians in the mountains of Guatemala, in firing on the street children of Brazil.
If the executions in Cuba are lamentable, when all is said and done, is not the courage of this tiny, stubborn island, condemned to solitude in a world where servility is a high virtue and a proof of talent, for all that admirable? In a world where those who do not sell themselves rent themselves out? *