Asphyxiation
A ten-hour teach-in at Wayne State University, sponsored by the Michigan Committee for a Democratic Haiti, and African Studies at Wayne State University, and endorsed by many university programmes as well as community groups, was held on 29 September, the eve of the third anniversary of the military coup. On the following day, many forums and rallies commemorated the anniversary itself. Dianne Feeley ©
International Viewpoint #260 October 1994 ty" to coup plotters. That is, they may be granted amnesty for the act of the coup, but not for the crimes of murder, terror, and rape.
What remains to be seen is whether the popular movement, no matter how bloodied, can rise and reshape itself. Solidarity activists, US grass-roots movements and socialists need to clearly oppose Washington's manoeuvres. We need to give solidarity to the Haitian masses, who have fought tenaciously for generations to secure democracy and
FIDEL Castro has a victory. He has compelled Mr Clinton to reverse an American policy that, since the Cuban
Refugee Act of 1966, gave produced the Bay of Pigs debacle in
1961 and the collaboration of the US government with organised crime in a series of increasingly grotesque projects justice.
JANETTE HABEL
• Support the Haitian people's right for President
Aristide's return and right to function without conditions!
• The Popular Movement yes! US/UN occupation no!
• The right of political asylum for Haitian refugees! Shut down Guantanamo! * automatic US entry to anyone leaving Cuba. Mr Clinton now is sending refugees picked up at sea to Guantánamo, the US naval base in Cuba, and putting those who reach the United States into camps. This is a comprehensible response to the anxiety of Floridians and others over the new and deliberately provoked refugee flow, but it is nonetheless a US humilia-
"It is the latest event in America's 35-year obsession with Fidel Castro that for Mr Castro's murder."] This comment by the American journalist William Pfaff bears witness to the unease provoked in the United States by the lack of symmetry in the immigration policy adopted towards, respectively, Cubans and Haitians. The latter, fleeing the pitiless repression of the dictator Raul Cedras, are considered as economic refugees and deported to Guantánamo, while the second, judged victims of the "tropical gulag", benefit from a privileged political status. The fear of a massive Cuban exodus on the eve of the crucial mid-term Congressional elec-
THE U.S. ... ...movement in solidarity with the pro-democractic forces in Haiti opposed the US occupation of Haiti with demonstrations and vigils in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles. Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area, Washington DC. Since last July most solidarity organisations had been operating under a planned action called for the day of the intervention or the following day. Organisations in solidarity with Central and Latin America worked with the Haiti groups to build the meetings or demonstrations. However all the actions were small (50-300), limited to the revolutionary left, peace forces and Haitiand living in exile. This is partly due to the fact that President Bill Clinton identified US interests with opposing human rights violations, and specifically called the leaders of the military coup murderers, rapists and torturers in his 15 September address to the nation. The majority of the Congressional Black Caucus, usually a grouping taking progressive political positions and Randal Robinson, an African American whose group, TransAfrica, had been instrumental in opposing US investment in the South African apartheid regime, called for US military intervention and supported the occupation. Because the US media portrayed the mainstream debate over US intervention in Haiti as one in which the right was opposed and the progressive forces supported it, few Americans knew that the Haitian popular movement and the US-Haitian solidarity movement were opposed to any form of intervention and called for the tightening of the embargo. In fact, the media presented the embargo as only hurting the poor which the rich got richer. Of course this was true as long as there were loopholes in the embargo. So far many Americans, there seemed to be no other alternative to ending the military coup and its horrific repression but to send in the troops. The Haitian solidarity movement, which has only the most minimal national co-ordination, recognises the need to educate the American population in the face of the tremendous distortions presented by the range of politicians and the media. In early October, for example, the US media portrayed the paramilitary bterror against an unarmed civilian population as "Haitian-on-Haitian violence"
tions in Florida led Clinton to change a policy which was over twenty-five years old, and whose main principle consists in reinforcing the embargo to stimulate illegal emigration while dissuading legal emigration which is regulated by the accords signed between Cuba and the US in 1984.
### Tensions
The objective is a double one; to increase the pressure on Cuba itself, to increase the tensions there, and to put the haven of American liberty in a good light, through the clandestine arrival of Cuban "balseros".2 But the internment, in camps surrounded by barbed wire, of tens of thousands of refugees on a military base, makes a joke of all democratic principles evoked by Washington to justify its Caribbean policy.
Moreover, the viability of such a "solution" is doubtful; the confrontations, even before the arrival of the Cubans, between Haitian refugees and US marines at the base (sixty-five people were wounded) indicate the explosive character of such human concentration. In this sense, Castro has effectively turned against his enemies
1. Interational Herald Tribune, 25 August 1994.
2. A rudimentary raft made with tyres and bits of wood, so as to cross the straits of Florida, or around 150 kilometres.
11
Asphyxiation
International Viewpoint #260 October 1994 the gun aimed at his own head. Unlike Erich Honecker, who closed the frontiers of East Germany, Castro opened his, thus avoiding the repressive option. Indeed, it was following attempts to stop refugees fleeing (leading to deaths and injuries) that serious incidents took place in July in Havana, provoking for the first time hostile public demonstrations. By allowing the malcontents, the down and outs, the unhappy or marginalised youth, to leave, Castro hoped to stiffen the ranks and rebuild a broad consensus broken by the breadth and duration of the crisis.
### Gravity
But none of this can hide the gravity of the situation on the island. The collapse of exchanges, the economic disorganisation following the disappearance of what is still called the "socialist camp" in Cuba, have amplified considerably the effects of the US embargo in force
Even if it does not explain everything, this embargo, reinforced in 1992, has catastrophic effects, often underestimated in Europe, although noted by the American press. All trade with the island is virtually forbidden. Boats which trade with Cuba cannot dock in American ports for at least six months. Most Americans expose themselves, in principle, to legal proceedings if they visit the island. Even the UN sanctions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq authorise the purchase of food and medicines for humanitarian reasons; but, in Castro's Cuba, US food and medicines can only be obtained when they result from dona-
Certainly, the embargo is not alone responsible for the crisis. The brutality of the break with the ex-USSR has led to a veritable economic collapse. The logic of development (or rather nondevelopment) implied by the subordinated integration of Cuba in Comecon has been suddenly broken, depriving the country of its sources of supply and its export markets. Some basic articles have suddenly disappeared, products as indispensable to agriculture as fertilizer and insecticides are no longer available. Replacement parts for the repair of factories, in particular in sugar, no longer exits. This largely explains why the last two "zafras" (sugar cane harvests) have been the worst for three decades.
One cannot, however, avoid the question of the government's own responsibility for the current economic difficulties. As Roberto Robaina, the 12
Cuban minister for foreign affairs has put it, "bureaucratic obstacles" have also contributed to the crisis,4 and more generally the economic policy chosen by Castro himself, characterised by an arbitrary and voluntarist centralisation, which leaves no place to local initiatives, can be criticised. The contradictions of the economic reforms undertaken since 1993 and the inequalities which have flowed from them, and the legalisation of the dollar, have profoundly disorientated a population previously united (in still significant proportions) around a project of social justice and national liberation. It is this consensus of resistance which has been broken by the needs of what is now called the struggle against "egalitarianism", judged responsible by the Cuban leaders for the very low productivity of labour. This judgement led to vigorous protests during the workplace assemblies held earlier this year where the waste and corruption of the leaders was criticised, without any programmatic alternative emerging.
### Fate
The end of the Cuban crisis is not predictable, in that the fate of the island is over-determined by the historic conflict which opposes "the most powerful state in the world to one of the weakest". This smacks, in Pfaff's words of "the realm of political pathology" 5 But US diplomacy cannot be reduced to psychiatry. It is guided by two parameters; the needs linked to internal policy (the weight of the Cuban electorate in Florida, on the eve of Congressional mid-term elections in November and in two years for the presidency) and those linked to foreign policy. In addition to the crisis in Cuba there is that of the Dominican Republic, where fraudulent elections a year ago reinstated a quasinonagenerian dictator violation of human rights can no longer be counted, and the economic situation gets worse and worse. In Jamaica, the situation is hardly better. Outside the islands, the countries bordering the Caribbean (Mexico and Venezuela) could in the years to come experience a destabilisation which would compromise the proposals for the enlargement of Washington's economic sphere on the continental scale. In this optic, the Cuban issue remains vital to the US. Eliminating this anomaly is not just an economic imperative, but a political one; it underlies the control of the region and the credibility of the world's most powerful nation.
After the end of the cold war, how can such harassment be legitimised, if not by the necessity of overthrowing the dictatorships and re-establishing demoracy? Pfaff ironically remarks: "Only a truly innocent man could say, as Bill Clinton said on [19 August], that all the United States wants for Cuba is that it be swept up in the hemisphere wave of "democracy and freedom"."6
Infernal
The Cuban emigrants are fleeing first and foremost from an infernal everyday existence; but political asphyxiation also aggravates their demoralisation and despair. In this sense, the crisis is not only social, but also institutional. The gap between the cultural level attained by the new generations and an authoritarian and repressive mode of government has never been so large. The germs of revolt which now manifest themselves witness to it, even if they only represent a minority.
But the so-called democratic normalisation which is demanded of a small, poor third world country is a denial of justice; it hides — just like so-called humanitarian intervention — other priorities, it masks the oppression of the weakest by the strong
Like all embargos, this one has been imposed - and recently re-inforced — on the Cuban people, to bring it to its knees. Its lifting is the first of democratic demands. *
3. Time, 29 August 1994.
4. Le Monde, 4-5 September 1994.
5. International Herald Tribune, 25 August 1994.
6. Ibid.