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Oct 10, 1998, 3:00:00 AM10/10/98

Re: Crimes against humanity

Author: Tom Nichols <nich...@concentric.net>
Date: 5 July 1998

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From: Tom Nichols <nich...@concentric.net>

Rowland Brucken <peng...@juno.com> is quite right when he says that my
postings are not "informed by international human rights law in theory or
practice or American legal history." They are informed by an understanding of
international *politics* and the realities that U.S. policy must face in
the international system, not on theories of international law.

Brucken writes that "If an ICC is created, and Dr. Nichols' views continue
to reflect official policy..."

Yet again, I should emphasize: My views are my own and do not in any way
reflect official U.S. policy. This one issue, in fact, is perhaps the
*only* place where I agree with the Clinton Administration's foreign policy
at all. Perhaps my agreement with current policy is all Mr. Brucken meant,
but I thought I should be clear on this one more time.

One other point:

>What disturbs me more, though, is the completely unqualified and
unsubstantiated >rejection of all non-Western jurists as prejudiced and
incompetent. Leaving aside
>the racist implications of such a statement which I assume Dr. Nichols
>did not mean to touch upon, what about the hundreds of foreign
>lawyers/future judges who attend American law schools every year?

First of all, I didn't tar "all non-Western jurists," but rather expressed
severe reservations about those from regimes that do not share the basic
values on which a court would function. Cuba, last time I checked, was a
"Western" country. Japan, on my map, is in the East. But I would object to
a Cuban justice in a way I would not object to a Japanese justice. Mr.
Brucken may be content with the idea of representatives of the Chinese
government working on human rights commissions and later on an ICC; I am
not. (And after President Clinton's recent trip, I am even less
encouraged.) But it is typical and unfortunate that any discussion by an
American of American self-interest leads to charges of "strident
nationalism" and perhaps even "racism." Those wondering why I would not
want American participation in the ICC need look no further than Mr.
Brucken's use of such terms, for I am sure it would be only a matter of
time before an ICC devolved into a forum for such charges against the
United States.

As to the rest of his points, I think I've addressed them in my
conversation with Iris Borowy.

Tom Nichols
Naval War College

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Re: Crimes against humanity

Author: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>
Date: 7 July 1998

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From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

Dear colleagues:

I have just returned from a trip to Santiago de Cuba where I took part in a
conference on the 100th Anniversary of the Spanish-Cuban-American War. I
find that my posting criticizing Dr. Nichols' arrogance has received some
attention from him and others and that the thread on "Crimes against
humanity" has continued in a very interesting and controversial way.
Unfortunately, although I came reinvigorated after visiting some of the
sites of battles fought together by Cuban and Americans against Spaniards
and have a lot to say about the different issues being raised, especially
about the fitness of any jurist coming from Cuba, I have also found that my
computer is out of order and I am using a borrowed one which does not allow
me to answer in full detail everything that has been said. I will be coming
back as soon as I can solve this technical problem. I just want you to know
I have not withdrawn or retreated from the debate.

Carlos Alzugaray

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Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 14 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

This is the first part of my answer to Dr. Nichols and Dr. Mayer.

I notice that my posting addressed to the arrogant nature of Tom Nichols'
assertion about the superior moral and ethical qualities that justify the
U.S. position of rejecting an independent ICC on the grounds that it might be
politically manipulated against eventual American defendants or that it might
include judges from countries which, by the nature of their political system,
are not qualified to sit in judgment of U.S. offenders, has been questioned
by several colleagues.

I know that it will be rather difficult to address one by one all the
assertions made, so I will try to answer in a general from, although I will
answer some of Dr. Nichols' arguments, because he has been specific in
discussing my posting.

Of course, I do not think Cuba is perfect or that there are not shortcomings
in my country. Of course, I do not expect to be believed by some of the
colleagues that have written in this thread if I tell them that I have been a
lay judge in our tribunals, elected by the municipal assembly of my
territory, and that in many occasions the decisions taken by the court where
I served were against the specific wishes of the law enforcement authorities,
sometimes because they did not present a good case, sometimes because we
simply thought they were wrong. Of course, I do not expect to be believed by
those same persons if I tell them that I have served in the electoral
commissions at the municipal level and can vouch for the fairness of the
Cuban electoral process, in which more than 95% of the voting population
regularly participates. I would probably be called a liar or accused of
engaging in Communist propaganda. By the way, I feel very proud of being a
Communist, although I recognize that in the name of Communism, Stalin, Pol
Pot and others have committed heinous crimes.

But I think that there is an argument which can hardly be questioned if we
are talking about the character of the Cuban system and its alleged
dictatorial nature. Could any dictatorial regime have survived for more than
35 years the economic warfare and propaganda attacks that the U.S. -the
greatest economic, military and political power on earth- has launched if it
did not enjoy that support? We are not talking here about the passive support
of the 45-50% of the American electorate that usually does not vote in
elections. We are talking about people who are asked by their government to
make enormous sacrifices every day to keep its independence and freedom in
the face of a very difficult economic environment because the U.S. sanctions
against Cuba are so encompassing that they include food and medicines,
exclude Cuban foreign trade from an economy that is 20% of the world's and
increases the costs of any operation done in the rest.

Even though Cuba has faced a very difficult situation since 1989, no school
or hospital has been closed and the country has been able to maintain its
vital social statistics, very similar to first world's ones, less than 10
deaths for 1000 births, 98% literacy, more than 75 years life expectancy. By
the way, I feel very proud about these accomplishments and I think that it
shows the moral and ethical strengths of our system, which, I repeat, is not
without mistakes and shortcomings.

Dr. Nichols seems to be particularly bothered by Dr. Peraza's assertion that
'the U.S. was engaged in "40 years of genocidal
war" against Cuba.' Although it is a rather strong charge which might seem
exaggerated, let me just quote from a State
Department Memorandum written by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for
Inter-American Affairs, Lester D. Mallory,
for his boss, Roy Rubottom, on April 6, 1960, on the 'Decline and Fall of
Castro':

'Salient considerations respecting the life of the present Government of Cuba
are:

'1. The majority of Cubans support Castro (the lowest estimate I have seen is
50 percent).

'2. There is no effective political opposition.

'.....

'6. The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through
disenchantment and disaffection based on economic
dissatisfaction and hardship.

'If the above are accepted or cannot be successfully countered, it follows
that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the
economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result
of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while
as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in
denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, TO
BRING ABOUT HUNGER, DESPERATION AND THE OVERTHROW OF THE GOVERNMENT.'
(_Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba_,
Washington: United States Printing Office, 1991, EMPHASIS MINE).

I do not think it necessary to prove that since the 60s the U.S. enforced
that policy, together with parallel measures, which included, among other
things, a CIA station in Miami, manned by 500 case officers with more than
6,000 operative agents, engaged in sabotage and all kinds of criminal acts
against Cuba and countries friendly to Cuba. Recently published CIA documents
from that period bear out that statement. (By the way, some of these agents
continued doing misdeeds after the CIA closed down the operation in the 70s.
Among the most notorious actions committed by these people was the Watergate
operation against the offices of the Democratic Party in 1972. A much less
known action of these people was the blowing up of a Cubana Airlines craft in
Barbados en 1976. The people responsible for this heinous crime, which cost
the lives of 73 persons on board, have enjoyed U.S. protection and
benevolence. Orlando Bosch, the mastermind behind this plan is now living in
Miami after being released from a Venezuelan prison. Another one, a certain
Sr. Posada Carriles, became again a CIA operative during the wars in Central
America in the 80s and is now believed to be responsible for a series of
bombings of hotels in Havana last year, in one of which a young Italian
tourist was killed.)

After reading the above citation, can there be any doubt about the intent and
purposes of what the United States has done
since that date in its relations with Cuba? Can the economic, commercial and
financial blockade of Cuba be justified in any
form? Isn't Pope John Paul right when he said sanctions against Cuba were
morally and ethically unjustifiable? What right does
the U.S. have to continue that policy when the UN General Assembly has clearly
called it to stop it by increasing margins?
Only Uzbekistan and Israel have sided with the American government on this
issue. To be quite frank, this defiant attitude can
only be explained by the arrogant nature of the way of thinking of Dr. Nichols
and others who hold the same 'holier than you'
attitude.

Dr. Nichols and others, repeating something that has been said and not
verified, say that Cuba has not opened its borders to all who want to leave.
Let me remind Dr. Nichols that the present immigration agreement between Cuba
and the U.S. was signed in 1994 at the insistence of Cuba after several years
of unsuccessful negotiations. Before that date, the U.S. government did not
accept the principle, suggested by the Cuban side, that in order to solve the
question of an orderly flow of migration between the two countries, the U.S.
had to issue around 20,000 visas a year. The U.S. position, from the 1960s
until the 1994 'balseros crisis', was quite hypocritical: it closed down all
communications between both countries and prohibited normal emigration while,
at the same time, instituting the 1967 Cuban Adjustment Act which gave Cubans
illegally entering the U.S. the privilege of being admitted in the U.S. and
given the well known green card one year after entering. The U.S., in fact,
was stimulating illegal immigration of Cuban nationals, while making it
impossible to do so legally. Add to that combination the fact that Cuba is an
underdeveloped country close to the richest country on earth (a natural
condition for emigration currents to develop and grow) and the propaganda
campaign made from illegal radio stations transmitting all kinds of
disinformation to Cuba and it is natural to have an explosive situation of
people wanting to leave Cuba, mostly for economic reasons. Since 1994 the
situation has been normalized but basically because the U.S. has, at long
last, accepted the original Cuban position: allow normal legal migrants and
detain and return illegal ones, as it does with every other country.

By the way, during that period, several Cubans hijacked planes or boats to
Florida putting at risk and indeed bringing to their
deaths several people. Every time that any of these criminals was brought to
trial, American courts have freed them, without
taking into account the overwhelming evidence of their crime.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 15 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

This is the second part of my reply to Dr. Nichols and Dr. Mayer:

Dr. Nichols presents the case of the two planes shot down over Cuban air
space in February 1996 without recognizing certain facts that are important.
Let me start by saying that it is extremely regrettable that 4 people died in
that incident. They were unnecessary victims of the situation of relations
between our two countries. But they were hardly innocent. These people,
together with their boss, Jose Basulto, one of the former CIA agents I
referred to above, had been violating Cuban air space for several months.
They usually left Florida filing faked flight plans and then entered Cuban
territory either to buzz the city of La Habana or to throw inflammatory
propaganda on the city's inhabitants. This was not only an illegal act, known
to U.S. authorities, but a provocative action against the normal operation of
civilian air transport. Between 60,000 and 80,000 commercial and other
civilian flights cross Cuban territory a year through its three air
corridors, which connect North and South America. Cuba takes very seriously
its responsibilities for the security of these flights, a large majority of
them of U.S. origin and carrying American citizens. It has to be added that
Cuba must also guard these corridors against their use by drug traffickers.
Before the incident Cuba advised U.S. authorities of the dangers caused by
these irresponsible activities. American officials agreed and promised to act
on this but did not do it. Cuba had not many more options but to act in order
to stop these violations which could have resulted in an even bigger tragedy.

Another issue I would like to address is the question posed by one of my
critics on the character of the 1,200 persons of Cuban origin who were
recruited, organized, financed and trained by the CIA in order to invade Cuba
in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs. It is simply ridiculous to call these people
simple 'anti-Castro fighters' as if that were some sort of condition which
would permit any kind of misdeed. In reality, as all recently declassified
documents demonstrate, they did something that every legal system I know
deals with in a very harsh manner: they took up arms against their fatherland
at the behest and for the benefit of a foreign power which committed, through
them, an act of unprovoked aggression against another country. When most of
them were taken prisoners in Cuba, they were tried and condemned to different
sentences. Only two of them were executed, but after been proven that they
had been members of Batista's police and committed several murders during the
dictatorship. Except for these two, the rest was released after less than two
years, when the U.S. agreed to pay compensation for the damages caused to
Cuba. By the way, at the beginning of the Revolution, in 1959, Cuba requested
the extradition of Batista's most corrupt and criminal collaborators, accused
of murder, rape, torture and illegal appropriation of public funds. The U.S.
did not comply. Some of these people are alive today in American territory
and are the intended beneficiaries of the Helms-Burton Act, which is
designed, among other things, to impose on Cuba the return of all property
nationalized by the Revolution since January 1959, including those people who
were at the time Cuban citizens but have since become American citizens.

Finally, I would like to answer the critics, including Dr. Nichols, who have
mentioned another Cuban "sin": the presence of Cuban troops in Angola and
other African countries. Let me start by saying that these critics seem to
ignore that troops were only a small part of what Cuban internationalism
"exported": we also sent doctors, nurses, construction workers, engineers,
teachers and other specialists to countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America
and the Caribbean. Hospitals in Vietnam and Algeria; schools in Nicaragua and
Ethiopia; roads in Guinea and Peru and an airport in Granada are all concrete
witnesses of these Cuban efforts. Even after the demise of the Soviet Union
and the socialist community we still have a hospital resort in the East of
Havana dedicated to the treatment of 500 children at a time affected by the
Chernobyl disaster. At one time more than 22,000 young people from the Third
World studied medicine, engineering, teaching and other subjects in Cuba,
enjoying different kinds of scholarships. But even if only troops had been
sent, they were always used for defensive purposes against foreign
aggression, as in the case of Angola, where our soldiers fought two different
wars in 14 years. In 1975, our troops stopped a joint South African and UNITA
column at the doors of Luanda. What would have happened if Pretoria had been
successful in installing a regime subservient to its apartheid system in
Luanda in 1975? The history of Africa would have been different. Many times I
read about the supposedly important role played by economic sanctions in
bringing about the end of apartheid. I hear and read these stories with some
degree of cynicism since when I was in Johannesburg for the April 1994
elections as a member of UNOMSA (United Nations Observer Mission to South
Africa) I did not see much evidence of those sanctions; to the contrary, what
I saw led to me to believe that <Holiday Inn>, <BMW> and other Western
companies had a long established presence in South Africa. What is usually
forgotten in these analyses is the fact that the apartheid regime began to
unwind only after its troops suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of
Angolan and Cuban troops at Cuito Cuanavale at the end of 1987.

But let me ask why is it that, after so many years of fighting in Africa,
there has never been an accusation of Cuban troops committing crimes like the
ones committed by other foreign contingents in somewhat similar circumstances
(My Lai comes immediately to mind)? Simply because they were not soldiers of
a big power imposing themselves on another country, they were coming from a
Third World country and they were taught to respect the population and the
enemy. Violations of the military codes was treated harshly, as they should
be in any situation like that. The participation of Cuba in the African wars
against colonialism and apartheid has been recognized as a positive effort by
the Organization of Africa Unity and individual African leaders like Nelson
Mandela or Julius Nyerere. And this happened in a continent where some of the
Western powers have acted in quite a different manner: the murder of Lumumba
and the support to Mobutu for more than 30 years are stark reminders.

Before parting, let me tell Dr. Nichols that there are countries which do not
want U.S. aid, especially when we know it is going to be used as a weapon to
extort and manipulate our international positions. Cuba is better off in this
respect, we do not have to risk U.S. wrath because we have endured everything
else, except a direct military invasion. But I do not expect that to happen,
although I do not exclude it. I'd rather welcome Doctor Nichols to Cuba and
show him the monuments on San Juan Hill in the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba,
where there is a tomb for an unknown soldier from each of the contingents
that fought there. Or maybe visit the Tree of Peace where there are
inscribed, in huge bronze books, the names of all Cuban and American soldiers
who died in that battle 100 years ago. However, for that to happen, we would
have to wait until the U.S. government repeals the present unilateral
sanctions against Cuba and Dr. Nichols can exercise, if he wanted, his right
to travel freely.

The Spanish-Cuban-American War was a 'splendid little war' for the U.S., as
John Hay said, but it was a tragedy for Cuban independence fighters. They had
struggled for over 30 years to gain independence from Spain and when the
American intervention took place, it was not independence what we received,
but military occupation and then a new kind of dependence. To add insult to
injury, even though U.S. troops would not have been able to take Santiago
without Cuban aid, American generals and troops entered the city to take over
from Spain and did not even have the courtesy to invite Cuban officers and
soldiers to participate in the official handing over ceremonies. That act
lacerated Cuban hearts, but we do not harbor ill feelings as the monuments
around Santiago demonstrate.

Although I have been extensive and somewhat extemporaneous, I felt I could not
let some of the things been said about Cuba
without an answer.

But the real issue in this thread is whether any country which considers
itself a member of the international community (a phrase sometimes used in a
very restrictive manner in the official discourse to mean a few super, great
and medium powers, or even the five permanent members of the Security
Council, or even only the Western advanced countries) can be so arrogant as
to place itself above the rest and decide under which circumstances it will
participate in the normal process of international relations, based, let me
remind it, on the principle of sovereign equality of its member states,
according to international law. If we let that happen, then we are
establishing a negative precedent, we are letting a country dictate
conditions on others and that is a bad beginning even if that country could
be classified as pure and unblemished, a proposition which I find quite
preposterous.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 15 July 1998

From: Brad De Long <del...@econ.Berkeley.EDU>

On 14 July, Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu> wrote:

>I do not expect to be believed... if I tell them that I... can vouch for the
fairness of the Cuban >electoral process, in which
more than 95% of the voting population regularly participates.

1984 was fourteen years ago. It is probably a good thing that we are
occasionally reminded that George Orwell's vision
remains very, very real in some parts of the earth...

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 15 July 1998

From: Reid Rozen <r-r...@students.uiuc.edu>

Carlos Alzugaray directed a response to some recent postings by Tom Nichols.
I will leave the major work of responding to Mr. Nichols, but I'd like to
comment on a few points raised by Sr. Alzugaray. He wrote:

> Of course, I do not expect to be believed by those same persons if I tell them
that I have served >in the electoral
commissions at the municipal level and can vouch for the fairness of the Cuban
>electoral process, in which more than 95% of

the voting population regularly participates. I >would probably be called a
liar or accused of engaging in Communist propaganda.

I would not accuse Sr. Alzugaray of Communist propaganda here. Indeed, I am
surprised that the voter participation is only 95%. In typical Communist
elections, the participation rate hovers around 100%. The Cuban voters, in
contrast, appear positively passive and apathetic. The question, then, is
"what's wrong with the Cuban government, that it cannot motivate that lazy 5%
to vote?"

By the way, does Sr. Alzugaray know the number of opposition party candidates
who ran in and were elected in the last
election?

>But I think that there is an argument which can hardly be questioned if we are
talking about the >character of the Cuban
system and its alleged dictatorial nature. Could any dictatorial regime >have
survived for more than 35 years the economic
warfare and propaganda attacks that the >U.S. -the greatest economic, military
and political power on earth- has launched if
it did not >enjoy that support?

Contrary to Sr. Alzugaray's assertion, I am convinced that the Castro regime
could not have survived 35 years _without_ the
U.S. blockade. The remaining handful of Communist regimes left in the world --
China, Vietnam, Cuba -- all have one thing in
common: they are all subject to some form of economic pressure from the West,
primarily from the U.S.

More to the point, Sr. Alzugaray somehow suggests that brutal dictatorships do
not last for very long unless they enjoy
widespread domestic support, which, in turn, means that they can't be brutal
dictatorships. I don't think it's necessary to list all
of the examples from history that demonstrate the falsity of this argument.

--
George Popovici

Silence is an answer, but not the answer.
(George Popovici, ancestor of the poster)

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Oct 10, 1998, 3:00:00 AM10/10/98

Re: Crimes against humanity

Author: Carlos Alzugaray Treto <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>
Date: 26 June 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray Treto <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

On 24 June, Tom Nichols wrote:

> As a point of clarification, I do not believe the United States should be
> allowed to opt out of the ICC because it is powerful, but rather because >
it is superior to the states that would sit in supposed judgment of it. In a
> previous post I said that I would adhere to this position even if the U.S.
> did not have the actual power to resist the international community in >
this regard. I am not taking Thrasymachus' position that "justice is merely
the > right of the stronger;" if I was perceived as saying that, I hope this
> clarifies what I intended.

I have been following the discussion between Tom Nichols and Iris Borowy
and have tried to keep silent, both because I am Cuban and a personal friend
and colleague of Dr. Peraza, who is not only Vice President of the Cuban bar
association but a well known and respected jurist in Latin America and the
Caribbean. He is also President of the Cuban Society of Constitutional Law.
He has written many books and essays on both Constitutional and
International Law. Among his many merits, he was part of the Cuban side of
the inspection team that supervised the peace settlement in Namibia and
South West Africa.

What is really surprising about all this exchange is the arrogant nature of
Mr. Nichols' statements, most specifically the one that he made on his
latest post and which I quote above. I would never expect Dr. Peraza ever to
say that Cuba was better than any other country and could therefore never
allow one of its citizens to be judged by a tribunal formed from nationals
of other countries, even though Dr. Peraza is a patriot and loves very much
his country.

The kind of statement that Mr. Nichols has made is what makes
anti-Americanism a fact of life. You cannot go around treating everybody
else from a position of superiority and expect everybody else to take it and
shut up. Cuba has long suffered from U.S. imperialistic, yes imperialistic,
hostility. Of course it is not the American people that are responsible but
the U.S. government. Let me remind Mr. Nichols that in 1961 the U.S.
government organized a group of exiled Cubans, armed them and threw them to
an invasion of their homeland. I was very young at the time but remember
very well the charred bodies of young women and children killed in the
Cienaga de Zapata, close to the Bay of Pigs, by napalm bombs used by U.S.
planes piloted by Cuban mercenaries. They were poor people whose life had
been improved by the Revolution. That was certainly a crime against
humanity. We were not at war and these people had to pay dearly for the sole
fact of being poor Cubans. It was the U.S. government which caused this and
it has never apologized. This is only one example. I can also remind Mr.
Nichols that the U.S. government approved that one of its agencies, the CIA,
get in contact with gangster figures to kill the Prime Minister of Cuba, a
country which was at peace with the United States.

So let's not talk from a position of supposed moral superiority, because it
does not exist in the U.S. case.

Sorry to be so blunt, but Mr. Nichols has left me no other choice. If
humanity is going to solve its problems, all kinds of arrogance must be
eliminated.

Carlos Alzugaray,
Professor of International Relations,
ISRI, La Habana, Cuba.

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Re: Crimes against humanity

Author: Alexander Mayer <alco...@yahoo.com>
Date: 27 June 1998

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From: Alexander Mayer <alco...@yahoo.com>

Carlos Alzugaray Treto <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu> wrote:

>Among his [Dr. Peraza's] many merits, he was part of the Cuban side of
>the inspection team that supervised the peace settlement in Namibia
>and South West Africa.

Mr. Treto should have also discussed the role of Cuban troops in
Angola, which is also part of south-west Africa.

>What is really surprising about all this exchange is the arrogant
>nature of Mr. Nichols' statements, most specifically the one that he made
on his
>latest post and which I quote above.

What I find most surprising is that Dr. Treto does not state that Cuba
is a Communist country, and does not mention Fidel Castro's name.

>I would never expect Dr. Peraza ever to say that Cuba was better than any
other country >and could therefore never allow one of its citizens to be
judged by a tribunal formed >from nationals of other countries, even though
Dr. Peraza is a patriot and loves
>very much his country.

Cuba's human rights record is substantially worse than that of the
United States according to Amnesty International and all other
individuals and groups which monitor human rights.

>The kind of statement that Mr. Nichols has made is what makes
>anti-Americanism a fact of life. You cannot go around treating everybody
>else from a position of superiority and expect everybody else to
>take it and shut up.

I do not particularly like the implication that the United States is
somehow equal to Cuba in the area of human rights.

>Cuba has long suffered from U.S. imperialistic, yes imperialistic,
>hostility. Of course it is not the American people that are
>responsible but the U.S. government.

It should be noted that Dr. Treto does not talk about the Platt
Amendment or American "Gunboat Diplomacy" in Cuba, but only about
anti-Communist activities. If he would have dealt with the period from
before 1959, he would have had a point. However, he is only talking
about the Castro period.

>Let me remind Mr. Nichols that in 1961 the U.S. government organized a
group of exiled >ubans, armed them and threw them to an invasion of their
homeland.

They wanted to do that on their own. The United States did not give
them sufficient support, especially air support, and, for this reason,
they failed.

>I was very young at the time but remember very well the charred bodies of
young women >nd children killed in the Cienaga de Zapata, close to the Bay
of Pigs, by napalm bombs >used by U.S. planes piloted by Cuban mercenaries.

The word "mercenaries" implies hired soldiers who fight for whatever
side offers them more money. A more accurate term would be
"anti-Castro fighters"; they were fighting because of their political
views, not because they were "well-paid" by the United States.

>They were poor people whose life had been improved by the Revolution. That
was >certainly a crime against humanity.

Actually, it was a war crime. The crimes which take place during
wartime, which are justified by their perpetrators on grounds of real
or alleged military necessity are called war crimes. Crimes against
humanity are crimes which are not justified by their perpetrators on
ground of real or alleged military necessity. I am referring to a
large majority of Communist mass murder under Stalin, Mao, etc.
(numerically the worst mass murder in history) and a large majority of
the killing of five million Jews and half a million Gypsies during the
Holocaust.

>We were not at war and these people had to pay dearly for the sole
>fact of being poor Cubans.

It was a Cuban civil war, in which the U.S. supported one side. Cuba
also supported "one side" in civil wars in African countries like
Angola. The loss of life was unfortunate, but a U.S. "apology" for
being an "accessory" to this would be used by Castro to strengthen his
dictatorial regime. This would only hurt the cause of democracy in
Cuba, and, therefore, the real interests of the Cuban people. After
the fall of Communism in Cuba, the U.S. government should probably
apologize for the bombing.

>It was the U.S. government which caused this and it has never apologized.

The Cuban government should also apologize for worse crimes in the
area of killing political opponents (mass murder, crimes against
humanity), and for the Cuban role in African civil wars.

>So let's not talk from a position of supposed moral superiority,
>because it does not exist in the U.S. case.

There can be no doubt that there is no moral perfection in the
case of the United States. I am referring to the genocidal aerial
bombing of Nazi Germany, and of its Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian
allies, of some areas of Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and of
Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I am also thinking about the atomic bombs of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, the United States, unlike the
Communist and Fascist/Nazi countries, is not guilty of crimes against
humanity, but only of war crimes. Of course, the United States could,
and, in my view, should, improve its human rights record through the
elimination of the death penalty, through the prevention of future
Waco's and Ruby Ridge's, through the elimination of "special
treatment" on the basis of race or gender, and through curbing the
abuses of the I.R.S.
However, in the past, the Communist line was that "socialist"
states are "superior" to "imperialist ones". Why don't I hear that
argument any longer ?

>Sorry to be so blunt, but Mr. Nichols has left me no other choice. If
humanity is going >to solve its problems, all kinds of arrogance must be
eliminated.

Communism should be eliminated, too.

I am not sorry for my bluntness. I was a deportee from Southern
Bukovina to Transnistria during the Holocaust, and a political
prisoner in Communist Romania. My first "crime" was that the Antonescu
government of Romania thought that I, like most of the Jews of
Bessarabia and Bukovina, was pro-Communist. Of course, most
Bessarabian Jews were pro-Soviet, and many of them displayed
pro-Soviet behavior on the occasion of the occupation of their
province, and of Northern Bukovina, by the Soviet Union as a
consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (June 28, 1940). By
contrast, a substantial majority of the Bukovinian Jews did not. The
Romanian army committed war crimes and crimes against humanity against
numerous Jews, such as massacres, the summary mass executions at the
time of the liberation of the ex-Soviet areas, and mass reprisals. I
would also like to mention the crimes against humanity in transit
camps and on the way to Transnistia, and in three camps in southern
Transnistria, which, through the decision of the local authorities,
had become de facto death camps for southern Transnistria Jews.

Most Bessarabian Jews, and a substantial minority of the
Bukovinian Jews, like the people mentioned by Mr. Treto, were killed,
or died from preventable causes, during the Holocaust, which is the
name of the catastrophe suffered by the Jews and Gypsies during World
War II. Although I was a victim of Marshal Antonescu's "Crusade
against Bolshevism", I do not engage in anti-Romanian propaganda. By
contrast, Dr. Treto engages in anti-American propaganda on H-DIPLO,
which is funded by U.S. taxpayers such as myself, although he was not
a victim of U.S. anti-Communism.

As a former political prisoner under Communism and as an
anti-Communist, I felt compelled to bring up certain issues.

Of course, I think that nobody should be either above or below
the law, whether internal or international, neither President Clinton,
nor the United States, nor Fidel Castro, nor Cuba. However, I feel
compelled to disagree with Dr. Treto. He might dispute some of my
points, but I would beg him to use empirical facts, not rhetoric.

Alexander Mayer
Director of Progen
("Project Genocide")

Re: Crimes against humanity

From: Tom Nichols <nich...@concentric.net>

One other point:

Re: Israel and Eastern Europe

Author: Doridemont Teodorescu <dorid...@yahoo.com>
Date: 30 June 1998

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From: Doridemont Teodorescu <dorid...@yahoo.com>

Tom Nichols quotes me, in an earlier post:

>However, when President Constantinescu came to
>New York City a short while ago, I overheard a discussion, in
>Romanian, between the Romanian Consul-General in N.Y.C. and another
>ethnic Romanian, who gave the consul a copy of the debate about
>N.A.T.O. expansion on H-DIPLO. I could be wrong, but I would suspect
>that some "readers-between-the-lines" of the Romanian government are
>trying to figure out whether Nichols' point of view represents the
>line of the D.O.D. or of the J.C.S., and what kind of connections
>Mayer has in Washington.

I said that as a statement of fact, not because I have ever believed
in such an analysis. Yet, I do not lack connections with former
Romanian consuls, etc., and I know how the Romanian Foreign Ministry
works. However, after Nichols' clear and forceful denial, nobody is
going to doubt that his statement below is true.

[Nichols writes:]
>As I have said on repeated occasions, my opinions represent my own
>views and not those of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or any entity
>of the Federal government.

Mayer has indicated the nature of the D.O.D. line, which is not equal
to the views expressed by Tom Nichols.

>Back to our regularly scheduled programming, and apologies for the
interjection.

If anybody is interested in Romanian jokes about Clinton, who is
currently the topic of more jokes in Romania than any Romanian
politician, he should contact me privately. Also, if somebody thinks
that the current Clinton scandals have not affected the foreign policy
of the U.S., he should either contact me privately, or state his
disagreement with my view. Although I was both young and in Romania
back then, the foreign policy impact of the scandals in my opinion
reminds one of the situation in 1973.

My views do not represent the views of any government, party or
corporation.

Note (by George Popovici): Nichols' denial of representing the views of this
or that federal agency or department were caused by Doridemont Teodorescu.
The relevant discussion has already been posted elsewhere. Since that time,
Nichols' posts have often ended with the disclaimer below.

Re: Crimes against humanity

Author: Tom Nichols <nich...@concentric.net>
Date: 30 June 1998

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From: Tom Nichols <nich...@concentric.net>

Professor Carlos Alzugaray has laid out starkly the most important and
devastating charge that can be made against my position rejecting American
participation in the ICC. I have been very blunt and candid in my reasoning
about the ICC, and I thank Professor Alzugaray for being equally blunt and
candid in his response. I want to stress that what follows is not a
personal attack on him or his colleague Dr. Peraza (who, by virtue of his
comments to the world press, was the subject of previous posts) but rather
a general response to Alzugaray's comments. I should add, however, that my
opinion of the Cuban regime is bound to offend Alzugaray and others; it is
not my intention to offend but neither will I censor myself.

It bears repeating that my comments are my own opinion and not those of the
United States Navy or any other U.S. government agency.

Alzugaray writes:

>What is really surprising about all this exchange is the arrogant nature of
>Mr. Nichols' statements, most specifically the one that he made on his
>latest post and which I quote above. I would never expect Dr. Peraza ever to
>say that Cuba was better than any other country and could therefore never
>allow one of its citizens to be judged by a tribunal formed from nationals
>of other countries, even though Dr. Peraza is a patriot and loves very much
>his country.

For those just tuning in, Dr. Peraza was a delegate to the Rome conference
who claimed the U.S. was engaged in "40 years of genocidal war" against
Cuba. (My quote was to the effect that Cuba and regimes like it have no
moral standing to judge the United States or its close allies.) Two points
are relevant here.

First, as I said in another post, Dr. Peraza's feelings about his own
country are not relevant. There are Soviets, Nazis, Iraqis, Chinese and
many others who have loved their country, but their love of country does
not change the character of the regime. Second, if claiming that life in
America, and that American democracy, is superior to life in Cuba's
one-party, personalized dictatorship makes me "arrogant," than so be it. To
paraphrase from something I said in a recent discussion with Iris Borowy,
I'm not aware of anyone getting killed trying to get *in* to Cuba, and as
soon as Cuba opens its borders and puts itself to the test of a democratic
regime (that is, allowing people to speak freely and then to vote with
their feet) I'll take Professor Alzugaray's charge more seriously. Until
then, it is incumbent upon Alzugaray to explain why anyone should believe
him and not their own eyes about the nature of the regime in Cuba. It is
almost too easy to remind our readers of the Cuban Air Force's recent
destruction of unarmed civilian aircraft, but it is a fact that should be
remembered here.

Professor Alzugaray continues:

Let me take the "cheap shot" first and the sophisticated argument second.
The cheap shot is that I don't see anyone rejecting American aid,
assistance or know-how. (Well, let me qualify that: Communist Albania
regularly told us to take a walk, a position for which I had great
respect.) Yes, I realize that the poor of the world are not going to turn
down aid, no matter what its source. On the other hand, there are many
nations that are more than happy to take U.S aid--and to send their sons
and daughters to U.S. universities--while simultaneously claiming that the
U.S. is the locus of decadence in the modern world. (As a grad student, for
example, I was once treated to a lecture from a fellow student at Columbia
from Syria about how "fascist" the United States really was. I never cease
to be amazed at the lack of an "irony gene" in some people.) The fact is
that much of the world seeks to be more like the U.S. and the West in
general, rather than different from it, and I tend to think that
anti-Americanism is more the generalized resentment of the have-nots than
it is any rational political position.

The more sophisticated argument is to point out that the U.S. and its
allies are regularly asked to clear up some of the most noxious messes in
the world (like Bosnia). The U.S. has made mistakes, to be sure, but the
current Cuban regime--often hand in glove with one of the most odious of
international paraiahs, the former GDR--has never brought anything but
chaos and repression to the countries it has visited (a point brought out
by other listers) and it seems to me that I hardly need make the case that
the United States has been a relatively more benign presence in
international life (especially given its size and potential for mischief).

But let's go right to it and confront the issue of American aggressiveness
head on. Alzugaray writes:

>Cuba has long suffered from U.S. imperialistic, yes imperialistic,
>hostility. Of course it is not the American people that are responsible but
>the U.S. government. Let me remind Mr. Nichols that in 1961 the U.S.
>government organized a group of exiled Cubans, armed them and threw them to
>an invasion of their homeland. I was very young at the time but remember
>very well the charred bodies of young women and children killed in the
>Cienaga de Zapata, close to the Bay of Pigs, by napalm bombs used by U.S.
>planes piloted by Cuban mercenaries. They were poor people whose life had
>been improved by the Revolution. That was certainly a crime against
>humanity. We were not at war and these people had to pay dearly for the sole
>fact of being poor Cubans. It was the U.S. government which caused this and
>it has never apologized. This is only one example. I can also remind Mr.
>Nichols that the U.S. government approved that one of its agencies, the CIA,
>get in contact with gangster figures to kill the Prime Minister of Cuba, a
>country which was at peace with the United States.

Where to begin? ( Cuban "mercenaries?" Hardly.)

First and foremost, although we were at peace with Cuba, Cuba had
explicitly adopted (and to this day remains committed to) an ideology that
seeks the destruction of democracy as it is understood in the West. Cuba
was allied with the Soviet Union, and the failure to topple Castro's regime
allowed Castro to survive long enough to get involved in Khrushchev's plan
to plant missiles in Cuba. Khrushchev even claims that Castro wanted to
start a nuclear war over the October 1962 crisis. The world was spared a
nuclear holocaust, but no thanks to Fidel. The "poor Cubans" line rings
hollow: the Soviets intended to turn Cuba into a nuclear missile base, and
Fidel himself was willing to destroy civilization out of sheer pique. (This
is Khrushchev's account: if Alzugaray disagrees, let him take it up with
the Russians.) If Professor Alzugaray wants to press charges against war
criminals, let him start at home with Fidel, the man who was so willing to
bring about Armageddon that he even scared the Soviets themselves.

Professor Alzugaray ends by saying:

>Sorry to be so blunt, but Mr. Nichols has left me no other choice. If
>humanity is going to solve its problems, all kinds of arrogance must be
>eliminated.

There are no apologies necessary. I have taken no offense at this exchange,
and I hope Professor Alzugaray takes no personal offense at my response.
But I cannot deny what I think to be true: Cuba is a repressive
dictatorship, it has been a source of terrible mischief in international
life, and has even been the vehicle by which the world nearly incinerated
itself. Until Cuba is free, Cuban jurists have no place on international
tribunals of any kind, and certainly not on tribunals that would sit in
judgment of the nation to which so many Cubans have fled even at terrible
risk to their own lives.

Tom Nichols
Naval War College

The views expressed are those of the author and not of any United States
government agency.

gdpop...@my-dejanews.com

unread,

Oct 10, 1998, 3:00:00 AM10/10/98

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 16 July 1998

From: Tom Nichols <nich...@concentric.net>

I found Carlos Alzugaray's two-part response to my recent posts to be
wide-ranging, to say the least. (What the
Spanish-American War has to do with this is anyone's guess, and I will leave
that section of it aside.) I also found it eloquent.
But I did not find it convincing.

Alzugaray rests his argument against my "arrogance" on the supposed legitimacy
of the Cuban regime, the achievements the
regime has wrought, and a laundry list of Cuban grievances against the United
States.

The Cuban Revolution *did* improve some people's lives in Cuba--but it
impoverished others, including those who landed in Castro's political
prisons. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia likewise produced roads,
hospitals, and public transportation, just as it also produced the Gulag, and
I wish that neither revolution had taken place. (Who knows what Cuba would be
like today without the Revolution; for myself, I'd be willing to bet it would
have been better off.) But factoids about the longevity of Cuban citizens say
nothing about the nature of the regime itself: Cuba was and remains a
repressive nation that has impoverished and imprisoned many of its own
citizens for political purposes, and caused great mischief as a Soviet
surrogate in Central America and Africa.

The idea that such a state could produce judges who would act independently
of the government that trained and appointed them is nonsensical. Communist
judges (if they are in fact loyal communists) should act first and foremost
on their ideological beliefs and not on the principles of an international
system--dominated as it is by capitalist powers--they surely must believe is
corrupt; at the very least, citizens of a repressive state like Cuba run
afoul of their own government at their peril. (While on the subject of
Communists and their beliefs, as an aside I find it curious that a committed
Communist like Dr. Alzugaray is so indignant at being excluded from access to
the American capitalist marketplace.)

To answer the question Dr. Alzugaray poses: Yes, I think a dictatorship can
sustain itself in the face of U.S. economic sanctions for 35 years,
especially if nurtured by billions of dollars of credit (and weapons) from
the Soviet Union.

(As for that 95% election figure...I think Brad DeLong's comment sums it up.
Given natural things like illness or accidents, it's
probably statistically impossible to produce voluntary 95% turnouts--unless
we're talking about the kind of sham participation
that routinely gave Stalin 98% turnouts. Suffice it to say that I stand by my
insistence that Cuba is a police state and that
Castro has never faced a real election in his life.)

Dr. Alzugaray may note with satisfaction that Cuba, like some nations, did
not want or take American aid. Of course it didn't: it was being gorged on
Soviet aid, with which the Kremlin bought Cuba's compliance in international
affairs, as well as the use of the Cuban armed forces. Dr. Alzugaray wants us
to accept the image of poor, struggling Cuba, peacefully building socialism
while laboring under the baleful eye of the American colossus. Yet, this same
Cuba that was so poor, so damaged by U.S. economic warfare, managed to field
an army in Africa at the behest of its Soviet masters. Cuba, in 1998, lives
in a world it made: perhaps President Castro should have been less ardent in
his service to the USSR during the Cold War.

And let's discuss the Cold War for a moment. Dr. Alzugaray is right on one
score: the U.S. treated Cuba as an enemy from the start--even trying to
overthrow the regime--and well it should have. Communism is antithetical to
the interests of the United States (and, in my view, of humanity: it is
second only to Nazism as among the most inhuman systems of government in the
20th century.) The U.S. reacted harshly to the presence of a Communist island
allied with the USSR; I would even agree that U.S. policy in the 60s was
extremely coercive, perhaps just short of war. But let's be clear on one
point: economic warfare against a Soviet client is not "genocide" and I hope
we can now lay Dr. Peraza's smear to rest.

Thermonuclear war, however, *is* potentially genocidal. I notice that Dr.
Alzugaray is well versed on the Bay of Pigs, but
strangely silent on the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Now, I'm sure we'll hear
from some quarters about how we "drove the
Cubans into Soviet arms," an explanation I reject. But let's even go so far as
to accept that view: I would argue that after
October 1962 and the Missile Crisis, that explanation is irrelevant, for
Castro's actions showed him not only to be dangerous
but apparently willing to start a nuclear war and thus well-deserving of U.S.
opposition. If we're talking about genocidal
impulses...well, allow me a short citation from Khrushchev's (post-glasnost)
memoirs, in which he receives word from Castro
that an air strike against the missiles was imminent:

"Castro suggested that in order to prevent our nuclear missiles from being
destroyed, we should launch a preemptive strike against the United States. He
concluded that an attack was unavoidable and that this attack had to be
preempted. In other words, we needed to immediately deliver a nuclear strike
against the United States. When we read this I, and all the others [in the
Politburo], looked at each other, and it became clear to us that Fidel
totally failed to understand our purpose." _Khrushchev Remembers: The
Glasnost Tapes_, p. 177.

To those critical of American policy after 1960, I can only say: the failure
to remove Castro created a situation in which the planet was nearly
destroyed. Castro--the man in power in Cuba *right now*--demanded that the
Soviet Union launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States.

I have yet to see anyone calling for Castro's prosecution for conspiracy to
commit a crime against humanity. I assume that none of the international
legal specialists who are such ardent fans of the ICC would disagree that
launching a mass nuclear attack against civilian targets--for the Soviet
weapons could hit nothing else in 1962--in order to prevent a military strike
against military targets counts as such a crime.

Thus, let us all be spared the melodramatic image of innocent, peaceful Cuba
fighting malevolent Uncle Sam. The man running Cuba at this moment--its
dictator--was part of a plot to turn Cuba into a Soviet nuclear platform, and
was so willing to start World War III that even the Soviets were taken aback.
The Cuban regime made itself an important player in the Cold War, and paid
the price in justifiable American hostility.

As for the issue of immigration: Cuba, despite Dr. Alzugaray's protest, is
not free. Indeed, in an odd turn he suggests that the real culprit is the
United States, as though it were the U.S. responsibility to enforce free
immigration in Cuba by issuing visas. The Cuban regime has always used
emigration from Cuba as a weapon in its skirmishing with the U.S. (as poor
Jimmy Carter learned the hard way).

It is true, by the way, that the United States limits my freedom to travel to
Cuba. What it does *not* do is limit my freedom to criticize the U.S.
government, tear up my passport, and move to any nation that will have me.

As for Dr. Alzugaray's defense of the recent shootdown of a civilian
aircraft, I will not lend dignity to his repetition of the official Cuban
explanation by commenting on it further other than to say that no amount of
official warning justifies blowing an unarmed civilian craft from the skies
over open seas. None.

I will finish where Dr. Alzugaray did:

>But the real issue in this thread is whether any country which considers itself

a member of the >international community (a phrase sometimes used in a very
restrictive manner in the official >discourse to mean a few super, great and
medium powers, or even the five permanent members >of the Security Council,
or even only the Western advanced countries) can be so arrogant as to >place
itself above the rest and decide under which circumstances it will
participate in the normal >process of international relations, based, let me
remind it, on the principle of sovereign equality >of its member states,
according to international law.

How ironic, now that her Soviet sponsors are gone and the pipeline of aid is
closed, that Cuba has found strange new respect for international law and the
interstate system. I always thought that Communism rejected the idea of the
state--and the international system of laws that protect it--as outgrowths of
a corrupt capitalist order, part of the superstructure foisted on an
oppressed international working class (a transnational proletariat that does
not recognize the artificial boundaries of the interstate system). While it
is heartening to see Cuba discover a new affection for the international
status quo, I am suspicious of it and I remain committed to the position I
took at the start of this exchange: There is a moral difference between the
United States and Cuba, whatever the flaws of American policy, and that
difference does, in my view, allow the U.S. simply to opt out of submitting
itself to the judgment of Cuban (or North Korean, or Iranian, or Chinese)
representatives. I would not place any American officer in front of a
tribunal that had a representative of Fidel Castro's government on it. Dr.
Alzugaray calls that arrogant: I call it sensible, prudent and just.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 16 July 1998

From: "David A. Welch" <we...@scar.utoronto.ca>

On 15 July, Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu> wrote:

> Dr. Nichols presents the case of the two planes shot down over Cuban air space
in February >1996 without recognizing
certain facts that are important.

I would be curious to know the level from which the authorization to fire
came. Is there any evidence that this was a high-level political decision?

As for the rest of Mr. Alzugaray's post, I can vouch for the fact that it
faithfully reflects the sincere beliefs of most Cubans I
know, even many who oppose the current regime. I would encourage American
readers not to dismiss it as propagandistic.
Nevertheless, according to the most recent scholarship on the Bay of Pigs, Mr.
Alzugaray's post seriously understates the role
of indigenous Cuban opposition--most importantly, the Catholic opposition--in
the preparation and conduct of the landing. Of
course the United States trained and equipped and funded the operation, but as
almost any Brigade 2506 veteran will tell you,
the CIA was more of a pain in the neck than a real help.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 16 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

After writing my last posting for the "Cuba and the United States" thread, I
read an interview with Mr. Posadas Carriles appearing in The New York Times
on July 12th. That person is one of the so-called "anti-Castro fighters"
described in one of Alexander Meyer's postings, which I insist are really
responsible for different crimes in and outside Cuba. Let me quote some
excerpts from this article:

'A Cuban exile who has waged a campaign of bombings and assassination attempts
aimed at toppling Fidel Castro says that
his efforts were supported financially for more than a decade by the
Cuban-American leaders of one of America's most
influential lobbying groups.

'The exile, Luis Posada Carriles, said he organized a wave of bombings in Cuba
last year at hotels, restaurants and
discothques, killing an Italian tourist and alarming the Cuban Government.
Posada was schooled in demolition and guerrilla
warfare by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960's.

----

'In a series of tape-recorded interviews at a walled Caribbean compound,
Posada said the hotel bombings and other operations had been supported by
leaders of the Cuban-American National Foundation. Its founder and head,
Jorge Mas Canosa, who died last year, was embraced at the White House by
Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton.

----

'It was Cuban exiles like Posada who were recruited by the C.I.A. for the
subsequent attempts on Castro's life.

'Jailed for one of the most infamous anti-Cuban attacks, the 1976 bombing of a
civilian Cubana airliner, he eventually escaped
from a Venezuelan prison to join the centerpiece of the Reagan White House's
anti-Communist crusade in the Western
Hemisphere: Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North's clandestine effort to supply arms to
Nicaraguan contras.'

----

'Some of what he said about his past can be verified through recently
declassified Government documents, as well as
interviews with former foundation members and American officials.'

---

'More recently, reports in The Miami Herald and the state-controlled Cuban
press tied the operation (the bombing of Havana hotels - C.A.) to Posada.
However, he told The New York Times that American authorities had made no
effort to question him about the case. He attributed that lack of action in
part to his longstanding relationship with American law enforcement and
intelligence agencies.

'"As you can see," he said, "the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. don't bother me, and I
am neutral with them. Whenever I can help them, I do."

'Posada gave conflicting accounts of his contacts with American authorities.
Initially he spoke of enduring ties with United
States intelligence agencies and of close friendship with at least two current
F.B.I. officials, including, he said, an important
official in the Washington office.'

----

'Declassified documents unearthed in Washington by the National Security
Archives support Posada's suggestion that the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. had
detailed knowledge of his operations against Cuba from the early 1960's to
the mid-1970's.

'G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel to the 1978 House Select Committee on
Assassinations, said he had reviewed many of the F.B.I.'s classified files
about anti-Castro Cubans from 1978 and had noted many instances in which the
bureau turned a blind eye to possible violations of the law. As he put it,
"When I read some of those things, and I'm an old Federal prosecutor, I
thought, 'Why isn't someone being indicted for this?' "

'On one point Posada was direct and unrepentant: he still intends to try to
kill Castro, and he believes violence is the best method for ending Communism
in Cuba.

'"It is the only way to create an uprising there," Posada said.

"Castro will never change, never. There are several ways to make a revolution,
and I have been working on some."'

----

'Posada detailed instances of support from foundation leaders throughout his
career. Mas, he said, helped organize his escape
from a Venezuelan prison in 1985, and then helped settle him in El Salvador,
where he joined the White House-directed
operation that led to the Iran-contra scandal.

'"All the money that I received when I escaped from the jail," he said, "it
was not that much, but it was through Jorge."'

----

'Asked when he had last visited the United States, he answered with a laugh
and a question of his own: "Officially or unofficially?" A State Department
official said Posada was reported to have visited Miami in the summer of
1996.

'Posada acknowledged that he has at least four passports, all in different
names. He regards himself as a Venezuelan citizen,
but he has a Salvadoran passport bearing the name Ramon Medina Rodriguez, the
nom de guerre he assumed during the
Iran-contra affair, and a Guatemalan passport issued in the name of Juan Jose
Rivas Lopez.

'He also reluctantly admitted to having an American passport. But he would
not discuss how he had obtained it or disclose the name in it, saying only
that he occasionally uses it to visit the United States "unofficially," and
had once used it to gain refuge in the American Embassy when he was caught in
the middle of a revolution in the West African country of Sierra Leone.

'"I have a lot of passports," he said with a laugh. "No problem."'

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 16 July 1998

From: Brad De Long <del...@econ.Berkeley.EDU>

On 16 June, "David A. Welch" <we...@scar.utoronto.ca> wrote [in reference to
the two planes shot down over Cuban air space in February 1996]:

>I would be curious to know the level from which the authorization to fire came.
Is there any >evidence that this was a
high-level political decision?

I believe that there *is* some evidence that it was a high-level political
decision...

gdpop...@my-dejanews.com

unread,

Oct 10, 1998, 3:00:00 AM10/10/98

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 16 July 1998

From: Brad De Long <del...@econ.Berkeley.EDU>

On 16 June, "David A. Welch" <we...@scar.utoronto.ca> wrote [in reference to
the two planes shot down over Cuban air space in February 1996]:

>I would be curious to know the level from which the authorization to fire came.
Is there any >evidence that this was a
high-level political decision?

I believe that there *is* some evidence that it was a high-level political
decision...

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 16 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

Reid Rozen made several observations to my first posting. I suppose he does
not expect me to take seriously his observation about percentages. Of course,
the 5% who did not vote did so for several reasons: out of the country, sick,
did not want to vote, wanted to register their disagreement by not voting. As
president of an electoral district college I can tell him we had all types of
cases.

His observation about opposition candidates not running is a valid one,
though; probably the most serious allegation made against the Cuban political
system. However, it stems from the widespread believe in the Schumpeterian
dogma that democracy can only exist where there are several parties competing
for government posts. I won't say that maybe for many countries this is a
valid formula. The world has many political systems, party-oriented or not,
but they are not the same. Japan, for example, has had multiparty elections
for most of the post-war period, yet the Liberal-Democratic Party has been in
power most of the time. In Egypt, there are also multiparty elections, yet
Nasser's, Sadat's and Mubarak's party, originally the Arab Socialist Union
and now the National Democratic Party, has been in power all of the time.
There are multiparty elections in Morocco, but you can hardly call that
country, ruled for more than 30 years by King Hassan, a democracy.

The point I would like to make is that you cannot analyze political systems in
abstract. The pretention that there is only one
way to have a democracy is as dogmatic as claiming that the only democracy
possible is in the dictatorship of the proletariat, a
term that some Marxists, like me, have long abandoned.

The Cuban political system evolved from its historical past. Before 1959,
under U.S. hegemony, we had multiparty elections. We also had corruption,
violation of human rights, gangsterism, the maffia running hotels and casinos
in Havana, electoral fraud, poverty, illiteracy, widespread unemployment (20%
in normal times) and more than 60 deaths for 1000 child births, among other
maladies. That system was not effective enough so as to stop first Colonel
Machado in 1932 and then General Batista from 1933 to 1940 and from 1952 to
1958 to become brutal dictators. We did not have national independence,
social justice or economic autonomy. We have eliminated the former and
obtained the latter under the present system.

Dr. Reid Rozen also wrote:

>Contrary to Sr. Alzugaray's assertion, I am convinced that the Castro regime
could not have >survived 35 years _without_
the U.S. blockade.

I think Dr. Rozen has a valid point. No doubt that by putting itself as head
of the opposition the U.S. government in fact deligitimized any and all
opposition. But let me ask, if what Dr. Rozen says is correct, then why
doesn't the U.S. lift its blockade and let things be? Maybe it is because
some people in Washington know that things won't play out as easily as that.
There was a legitimate revolution in Cuba in 1959 because the system was in
crisis and could not solve its contradictions in a reformist manner. The
U.S., which was part of the problem and not part of the solution, was late in
recognizing this situation and then acted in an arrogant manner making a
secret war on Cuba. In any case, it would be a good idea for the U.S.
government to stop believing that it can overthrow the Cuban government by
leading the opposition. Only then, maybe, and I underline maybe, can we think
about a multiparty system.

Dr. Rozen also wrote:

>More to the point, Sr. Alzugaray somehow suggests that brutal dictatorships do

not last for very >long unless they enjoy widespread domestic support, which,
in turn, means that they can't be >brutal dictatorships. I don't think it's
necessary to list all of the examples from history that >demonstrate the
falsity of this argument.

I agree with Dr. Rozen, but the contrary proposition is not validated by
history either. But I must disagree in that you cannot call a government that
enjoys popular support a 'brutal dictatorship', unless you can prove with
facts that it is. Some of the participants in this debate, including Dr.
Rozen, have used that term to identify the Cuban government, but they have
not offered a single believable evidence of its supposed brutal character. On
my part, I have given data on support and benefits that the present system
has given to the Cuban people.

My point was basically that there must be something about the Cuban system
that has made it possible to survive the American onslaught, a point he does
not address, except in an elliptical manner. There have been many attempts to
explain this -one reason been maybe U.S. hostility- but still, the argument
remains that the Cuban government has remained in power in the most difficult
circumstances -in the 60s and in the 90s- and I simply suggest that it has
done so because it has popular support. That support is due, in my analysis,
to the fact that it has been able to deliver two important goods: national
sovereignty -the Cuban people's greatest frustration from 1868 to 1958- and
social justice, meaning by the latter, free health care, free education and a
fundamentally equal society.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 16 July 1998

From: "David A. Welch" <we...@scar.utoronto.ca>

Tom Nichols <nich...@concentric.net> wrote:

>It is true, by the way, that the United States limits my freedom to travel to
Cuba.

Well, not really. As I understand it, any American is free to travel to Cuba.
What Americans cannot do is spend American
dollars in Cuba. Therein lies the limitation. But there are several categories
of exemptions (six, if I remember rightly), one of
which is scholars traveling to Cuba for academic purposes--and that would
normally suffice to get Professor Nichols to Cuba
if he wanted to go.

Time for a little levity. The last time I crossed into the United States (a
few weeks ago), the only question the U.S. authorities asked me was: "Are you
traveling with any Cuban cigars?" A few days later some American friends came
to visit me in Toronto. The only question the Canadian authorities asked them
was: "Are you carrying any firearms?"

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 17 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

Dr. Nichols has responded to my two-part postings with a long message full of
inexact statements and perceptions that frankly
seem to come from the 1950s' best McCarthyst tradition, like this one:

>I always thought that Communism rejected the idea of the state--and the

international system of >laws that protect it--as outgrowths of a corrupt
capitalist order, part of the superstructure >foisted on an oppressed
international working class (a transnational proletariat that does not
>recognize the artificial boundaries of the interstate system).

Or this one:

>Communist judges (if they are in fact loyal communists) should act first and
foremost on their >ideological beliefs and not on
the principles of an international system--dominated as it is by >capitalist
powers--they surely must believe is corrupt; at the
very least, citizens of a repressive >state like Cuba run afoul of their own
government at their peril.

Or this one:

>The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia likewise produced roads, hospitals, and

public >transportation, just as it also produced the Gulag, and I wish that
neither revolution had taken >place. (Who knows what Cuba would be like today
without the Revolution; for myself, I'd be >willing to bet it would have been
better off.)

Although it is always difficult to make speculations on the 'what if' basis,
let me take a swing at this one, with a not too farfetched prognosis: By the
70s the Mob had finally constructed a string of casinos and gambling holes in
Havana's Malecon, with the help of Batista's henchmen who succeeded him in
the Presidency. Batista continued controlling things in the background as
Head of the Army. Drug consumption in a large scale was introduced. In the
80s Cuba became the main stop over for the Colombian drug cartels who,
jointly with the mafia became the purveyors of drugs to the U.S. Cuba's
social and economic situation remained the same, but now even in more
difficult condition because of the debt problem. In the 90s Cuba was
decertified by the U.S. for its connivance in the drug traffick. How does Dr.
Nichols like this scenario? I don't. Maybe we might agree on something.

Dr. Nichols claims he does not know what the 'Spanish-American War has to do'
with the problem we are discussing. Well, that's exactly the problem: It is
not the 'Spanish-American War'; it's the Spanish-CUBAN-American War, and it
has everything to do with what we are discussing. The U.S. government started
its relationship with Cuba by insulting its best people, the independence
fighters who had been struggling against Spain for over thirty years. After
that, it all went downhill with the Platt Amendment, the permanent, yes
permanent, treaty establishing the Guantanamo Naval Base which we cannot get
back, the second military occupation, Mr. Welles' mediation that stopped the
1933 revolution from establishing a really popular government, the imposition
of Batista and other things that I won't talk about lest Dr. Nichols
complains again about my large posting.

To make my posting short, let me answer very quickly some of his most blatant
inexactitudes:

According to Dr. Nichols, Cuba 'was being gorged on Soviet aid, with which

the Kremlin bought Cuba's compliance in international affairs, as well as the

use of the Cuban armed forces.' Well, everyone who has studied about
Cuban-Soviet relations, and many very good books and articles have been
written in the U.S., knows this statement to be completely false. Cuba acted
on its own and, in some cases, the Soviet Union had no other option but to
follow.

Dr. Nichols asserts that Cuba 'caused great mischief as a Soviet surrogate in
Central America and Africa.' Another statement which is not true and which is
not supported by fact. I believe in my previous posting I pointed out the
support of the OAU and individual African leaders. Of course, I suppose that
for Dr. Nichols 'great mischief' is anything that affected perceived U.S.
interests any where in the world, because, since the U.S. opposed communism
and communism is utterly and inherently evil, then anything the U.S. does is
allright and anything that anybody else does without U.S. approval or against
U.S. wishes is wrong, even if it mirrors U.S. actions.

Dr. Nichols complains that 'Alzugaray wants us to accept the image of poor,

struggling Cuba, peacefully building socialism while laboring under the

baleful eye of the American colossus.' That's a blatant misrepresentation of
what I wrote. But, yes, Cuba is a small underdeveloped country that cannot
imperil U.S. security in any way.

Dr. Nichols asserts that 'the U.S. treated Cuba as an enemy from the

start--even trying to overthrow the regime--and well it should have.
Communism is antithetical to the interests of the United States (and, in my
view, of humanity: it is second only to Nazism as among the most inhuman

systems of government in the 20th century.)' Again, a statement full of
McCarthyst presumptions and not true. If Dr. Nichols takes the time to read
the FRUS volume corresponding to Cuba 1958-1960, he will learn that the
Eisenhower administration took the decision to overthrow the Cuban government
between April and June 1959, several months before the arrival of the first
Soviet representative in September 1959. By the way, the Khruschev memoirs he
likes to quote also make it plain that the Soviet leadership did not consider
Fidel Castro a Communist in 1959 and 1960. CIA plans to overthrow the
government became operative between December 1959 and March 1960, a long time
before Cuba strengthened its relationship with the U.S.S.R.

Dr. Nichols makes a great deal about Fidel Castro's message to Khruschev
during the October Crisis (we call it October crisis in Cuba because it was
preceded by other crises in U.S.-Cuban relations). Evidently he gives a
slanted interpretation to the developments. If he has time to read the
Mongoose Operation papers as well as _Cuba at the Brink_, an excellent
account of the crisis based on meetings and interviews, written jointly by
James Blight, Bruce Allyn and David Welch, he will learn that Cuba had reason
to belief that an invasion of Cuba would take place and nuclear war would
ensue, in which case, Cuba would disappear. I remember it well. I was at the
University of Havana on the evening of October 28-29 and we were certain that
our country would be erased from the face of the earth. Because Fidel thought
an invasion was a very strong possibility, and the Kennedy Tapes recently
published bear him out, he recommended to Khrushchev a preemptive attack IF
it was confirmed that an invasion was going to take place. That is a big IF
which Dr. Nichols has conveniently ignored. If Dr. Nichols still thinks that
Fidel Castro wanted war with the U.S. at any cost, then let him explain why
Cuban troops have not attacked the Guantanamo Naval Base in 1962 or at any
other time?

I won't continue dignifying Tom Nichols with replies to the rest of his
posting, which contain some personal attacks. I have avoided these even
though some of the things being said about my country are really insulting. I
have tried to keep in mind that although U.S. administrations have acted in
ways which deserve a very strong condemnation, the American people, for whose
achievements in many fields I have great respect, are not responsible.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 17 July 1998

From: Iris Borowy <iris....@philfak.uni-rostock.de>

Though I am not such an "ardent supporter" of Cuba as of the ICC and would be
quite happy to see Castro leave, I would
like to offer some asides to Mr. Nichols recent contribution.

He wonders:

>Who knows what Cuba would be like today without the Revolution; for myself, I'd
be willing to >bet it would have been
better off.

A way to guess what a Cuba without the revolution would be like might be to
compare it to Guatemala. In 1954 the CIA staged a coup against the new
government there (which had not come into being through a revolution, though,
but was similarly regarded as pro-Communist). All evidence I am aware of
points to the interpretation that the Bay of Pigs operation was modelled
after the 1954 operation which was, obviously, highly successful. (My
knowledge is based mostly on Richard Immerman's _The CIA in Guatemala_.) In
how far Guatemala is an attractive model as an alternative to Cuba might be
an interesting discussion.

But factoids about the longevity of Cuban citizens say nothing about the

nature of the regime itself.

I do not know if the numbers mentioned are correct (I am typing this in the
institute, far away from my reference books at home, maybe someone else could
look this up?). But in general I believe that life expectancy is a very
important, if indeed not the most important factor when judging the
well-being of any given population, since it is affected by so many other
aspects, such as nutrition, access to medical assistance, housing and working
conditions as well as stress-related factors such as repression, constant
fear etc. As far as I know life in Cuba is marked by political repression and
the distribution with essential food is poor (including rationing of milk),
so the number, if correct, is quite astounding. Cuba would have to make up in
some other areas affecting the longevity of people.

> (As for that 95% election figure...I think Brad DeLong's comment sums it up.
Given natural >things like illness or accidents,
it's probably statistically impossible to produce voluntary 95%
>turnouts--unless we're talking about the kind of sham

participation that routinely gave Stalin >98% turnouts. Suffice it to say
that I stand by my insistence that Cuba is a police state and that >Castro
has never faced a real election in his life.)

I would also have grave doubts about the merits of elections in Cuba, but I
disagree that a high voter turnout is in itself a sign of undemocratic
elections. Elections in Europe usually attract about 80% of the people.
Belgium (unless the system was changed very recently) even makes voting
mandatory, fining people who fail to appear to vote. (If you cannot make up
your mind about one candidate or the other you just hand in an empty paper.)
So far I have never heard anyone calling Belgium a communist state.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 17 July 1998

From: Alexander Mayer <alco...@yahoo.com>

After my return from Washington, I will comment on the discussions generated
by my posts. I have faxed the following comments over the phone to my wife,
who has typed them up.

On 14 July, Carlos Alzugaray wrote:

>Of course, I do not think Cuba is perfect or that there are not shortcomings in
my country.

Dr. Alzugaray is admitting the obvious.

>Of course, I do not expect to be believed by some of the colleagues that have
written in this >thread if I tell them that I have
been a lay judge in our tribunals, elected by the municipal >assembly of my
territory, and that in many occasions the decisions
taken by the court where I >served were against the specific wishes of the law
enforcement authorities, sometimes because
>they did not present a good case, sometimes because we simply thought they were
wrong.

This has happened in many Communist countries, more often under more
liberalized regimes. The issue is whether the cases were in any way political
or not.

>Of course, I do not expect to be believed by those same persons if I tell them
that I have served >in the electoral
commissions at the municipal level and can vouch for the fairness of the Cuban
>electoral process, in which more than 95% of
the voting population regularly participates.

I do not dispute that Dr. Alzugaray has served in the electoral commission.
The National Assembly of People's Power has 589 deputies. All 589 candidates
received the necessary 50% of the votes for election in the last elections
for the legislature (February 24, 1993). The electorate was 7.5 million and
turn-out was 98.75% (see, for Example, THE STATESMAN'S YEARBOOK, 1997-1998
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997, p. 400-401). Even under Ceausescu in
Romania, most of the seats in the Great National Assembly were contested by
more candidates, all of whom were members of the Front of Democracy and
Socialist Unity, and almost all of whom (I think that the only exception was
Chief Rabbi Moses Rosen) were members of the Romanian Communist Party.

>I would probably be called a liar or accused of engaging in Communist
propaganda.

I would not be the one accusing Professor Alzugaray of being a liar or of
consciously engaging in Communist propaganda on this issue. The electoral
system in Eastern European Communist countries operated in the following way.
The number of people who had no way of voting was subtracted from the number
of people who had the right to vote, and this gave the number of potential
voters. Voter turnout was calculated by dividing the actual votes by the
number of potential voters. Some people who had the right to vote were
nevertheless not included among the potential voters: old and sick people who
could not go to vote, people who were out of town or out of the country, etc.
An Yugoslav Communist newspaper informs us that these people represented a
few percentage points of those who were entitled to vote. If one would adjust
for these people who had the right to vote but were not potential voters, one
would get a turnout of something like 95-96%, or whatever. I do not know if
my Cuban Communist critic has just acknowledged the real (as opposed to
doctored) turnout figures, which might very well be slightly over 95%.

Another issue is the honesty of the counting of the ballots. In Ceausescu's
Romania on the occasion of at least some of the elections, the counting was
conducted accurately. In other words, Communist A, who got more votes,
defeated Communist B. Important Party bosses of course ran uncontested. One
wouldn't want actor C, or factory director D, to defeat Politburo member E,
or the cousin of Ceausescu F. Of course, when Lithuania was annexed by the
Soviet Union, in some districts, voter turnout was much above 100%.

Communist parties or Communist-led Popular Fronts allegedly won a number of
multi-party elections which they had in fact
lost, as the archives show, such as the elections of 1947 in Poland, 1946 in
Romania, and the 1946 referendum in Poland.
The same seems to have happened in Lithuania in 1940, etc., when there was, I
believe, only one list.

>By the way, I feel very proud of being a Communist, although I recognize that
in the name of >Communism, Stalin, Pol Pot
and others have committed heinous crimes.

I would add Mao, Castro, Ceausescu, Zhivkov, Ho Chi Minh, etc. Moreover, the
crimes were not committed just in the name of Communism, but in a manner
consistent with its ideology, which was used to justify them. Even so, Carlos
Alzugaray's admission is important, even though he should have also listed
the names of a few leaders who were Cuba's allies.

>But I think that there is an argument which can hardly be questioned if we are
talking about the >character of the Cuban
system and its alleged dictatorial nature.

The issue of whether Castro was a good or a bad dictator, or a popular or
unpopular one, does not change the fact that he
was a dictator.

>Could any dictatorial regime have survived for more than 35 years the economic
warfare and >propaganda attacks that the

U.S.--the greatest economic, military and political power on earth-- >has

launched if it did not enjoy that support?

The rather large extent of popular support for Castro in the past did not make
his regime less dictatorial. The popularity of the
ruler at most makes the system somehow "legitimate", but not democratic.

>We are talking about people who are asked by their government to make enormous
sacrifices >every day to keep its
independence and freedom in the face of a very difficult economic >environment
because the U.S. sanctions against Cuba are
so encompassing that they include >food and medicines, exclude Cuban foreign
trade from an economy that is 20% of the
world's >and increases the costs of any operation done in the rest.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, sanctions against Cuba became
stupid for a number of reasons.

>Even though Cuba has faced a very difficult situation since 1989, no school or
hospital has been >closed and the country has
been able to maintain its vital social statistics, very similar to first
>world's ones, less than 10 deaths for 1000 births, 98%
literacy, more than 75 years life >expectancy.

The literacy rate was 95.7% according to the ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA 1997
BOOK OF THE YEAR, p. 590. I have not checked the other statistics. However,
the statistics in Western sources for Cuba, such as the ones cited above,
come from earlier years than from other countries. When the situation was
worsening in some areas, the Romanian statistical commission doctored the
figures or stopped publishing them during the late Ceausescu period.
Moreover, some neighboring countries, such as Barbados, have more hospital
beds per 10,000 people than Cuba does.

>By the way, I feel very proud about these accomplishments and I think that it
shows the moral >and ethical strengths of our
system, which, I repeat, is not without mistakes and shortcomings.

Of the Communist system, not of the Cuban people, believes my critic. The
issue is for him not one of patriotism, but of defending the regime. Cuba's
comparative placement in comparison with other countries in Latin America and
the Caribbean has not changed very much since before 1959. At least Castro
should be credited for not messing things up, like the Eastern European
Communist dictators, Mao, Kim il Sung, etc., did. Actually, he might have
improved the situation in a certain sense, because the people who left Cuba
were wealthier and more educated than average. Of course, Soviet aid played a
key part. The loss of independence in exchange for greater prosperity might
have been the choice of, or acquiesced by, the Cuban people, but it should
not be assumed that most nations would have chosen that path.

>There is no effective political opposition.

Castro did not tolerate opponents.

>The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through
disenchantment and >disaffection based on economic
dissatisfaction and hardship.

This is similar to the British blockades against Napoleon, and of Germany
during World War I. Yet blockades do not constitute genocides, or cause them.
Only the Holocaust deniers argue that the dead inmates found at
Bergen-Belsen, etc., had died because of the blockade, the disruption of the
means of communication by allied bombing, rather than because of the Nazi
policies.

>(By the way, some of these agents continued doing misdeeds after the CIA closed
down the >operation in the 70s. Among
the most notorious actions committed by these people was the >Watergate
operation against the offices of the Democratic
Party in 1972.

It should be said to Castro's credit that he has not attempted to give
campaign contributions to the D.N.C., like China, and post-Communist Russia
have done. And, of course, one should not forget Ron Brown's encounter with
the Vietnamese.

>After reading the above citation, can there be any doubt about the intent and
purposes of what >the United States has done
since that date in its relations with Cuba? Can the economic, >commercial and
financial blockade of Cuba be justified in any
form?

It can be justified, but this does not make the policy less stupid. Of course,
the U.S. also recognized the Soviet Union only in
1933.

>Isn't Pope John Paul right when he said sanctions against Cuba were morally and
ethically >unjustifiable?

I think that he is right, but he has said this, I believe, for only a few
years. Moreover, he has done this in order to help the Cuban people, not
Castro. However, President Clinton does not have the necessary anti-Communist
credentials to stand up to the proponents of the embargo. Nor does he have
the courage or the incentive to do so. Yet the Pope also criticized human
rights abuses in Cuba.

>... and the propaganda campaign made from illegal radio stations transmitting

all kinds of >disinformation to Cuba

Illegal ? I thought that transmitting from the U.S. to Cuba is legal under
U.S. law. Perhaps it is only illegal to listen to them in Cuba.

Perhaps Mr. Alzugaray would care to comment on this issue.

gdpop...@my-dejanews.com

unread,

Oct 10, 1998, 3:00:00 AM10/10/98

Date: 17 July 1998

From: Alexander Mayer <alco...@yahoo.com>

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 19 July 1998

From: Gregory Alegi <gra...@tin.it>

I have followed with much interest the debate between Carlos Alzugaray and
his critics. Although I feel privileged to have direct contact with a member
of the Cuban civil service, an opportunity I do not think I could easily have
outside H-DIPLO, it is unfortunate that much of what Prof. Alzugaray writes
sounds like propaganda or, at least, a rather unoriginal repetition of
official Cuban positions.

I agree with many of the points raised by American critics, including the
irrelevance of statistical factoids about health or public works which sound
surprisingly similar to those of noted democratic leaders Stalin, Hitler and
Mussolini. (The latter regime, by the way, continued to hold elections,
albeit gradually whittling away their significance - ultimately, the voter
could only approve or repeal in toto the entire list of candidates prepared
by the Grand Council.) Perhaps someone could expound on the difference
between an election (from the Latin eligere - to choose or select) and a
plebiscite (Latin: a vote of the people, with no trace of choice).

We could go on for ages on this and other individual items, and at the end of
the day we would all remain unconvinced
because of our fundamental ideological differences which lead to mutually
incompatible readings.

A few postings ago, for instance, Prof. Alzugaray extolled the fine record of
the non-imperialist Cuban troops in Africa,
contrasting it with the alleged behaviour of European peace-keeping troops in
various situations. It so happens that not
everyone agrees with this. I quote: "In Africa the Cuban army behaved like a
conquering army: there was immense illicit
trafficking (in silver, ivory and diamonds) and endemic corruption." (P.
Fontaine, in Courtois et al., _Il libro nero del
comunismo_, Milan, 1997, p. 620). Eventually the head of the Angolan
expeditionary force, General Arnaldo Ochoa, was
sentenced for smuggling diamonds. There also is (or was) a branch of the
security service called MC, which Cubans translate
as "Marijuana and cocaine", thereby giving away its main line of business.

Other troubling issues might be raised, starting with law no.32 of March
1971, which makes absence from the workplace a crime. Or the 1978 bill which
creates a new situation - "pre-criminal danger." And I quote again from p.
619: "In other words, a Cuban could be arrested under any pretext if the
authorities believed him to be a danger for the security of the State, even
if the accused had not yet committed any crime in this way. De facto, this
law turns into a crime any expression of thought which does not conform to
the regime's canons." Amnesty International now apparently puts the number of
political prisoners in Cuba between 980 and 2500, versus estimates of
15-20,000 in 1978 and 12-15,000 in 1986, but also against 4-500 admitted by
the government. It is estimated that 15-17,000 people have been shot and over
100,000 imprisoned or sentenced to labour camps etc.

Prof. Alzugaray will undoubtedly explain all this in very convincing terms.

But the question remains. While there might be more than one type of
democracy, and while democracies might have different laws, Communism seems
to be inextricable from totalitarianism, human rights violations, the lack of
self-correction mechanisms. Not to mention the failure of the so-called
scientific base of socialism and its skewed economics. As a Polish joke once
put it, "What is capitalism? The exploitation of man by fellow man. And
Communism? The exact contrary." The recently published _Livre noir_, the
Italian version of which I quoted above, adds archival evidence about the
bloody history of Communism, but its conclusions about its nature (not
"errors") are no different from those of Renato Milei, the former Togliatti
aide who in 1963 already wrote that there would have been Stalinism even
without Stalin. Even George Orwell had foreseen/described all this.

Some have asked what would have become of Cuba without Castro. Let's look at
it another way. The latest Italian cultural controversy is about Franco. In a
preface to a book of Spanish Civil War memoirs, former ambassador Sergio
Romano ventured that - knowing what we now know of Soviet rule, of the
difficulty of shaking it off, of the dismal record and condition of Eastern
Europe - perhaps Franco's victory turned out to be (in the long run) a good
thing for his country. The ink had yet to dry, when a fierce cultural fight
broke out over this reading. Certainly a difficult question, which asks us to
overcome the traditional Left/Good, Right/Bad (or Progressive/Good,
Conservative/Bad) categories to discover that the true distinction is between
Democratic/Totalitarian, between Individual/State, independent of the claims
or moral ground or theory of the State. All fanatics and all intolerance are
basically from the same mould, although available in different colours.

So, to wrap up these rambling notes.

1. We should not allow Prof. Alzugaray's most blatant untruths to go by
unchallenged, but also

2. We should not allow ourselves to be dragged so close to the trees that we
miss the forest altogether. The problem lies with
the basic concepts of Communism, not with individual mistakes in applying it.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 19 July 1998

From: "David A. Welch" <we...@scar.utoronto.ca>

There seems to be a certain amount of confusion on this thread as to whether
Castro sought to goad Khruschev into attacking the United States in 1962
(specifically, on October 26). Castro sought, in effect, to convince
Khrushchev to gird his loins for nuclear battle if the United States attacked
Cuba. The "if" is important. For this reason, Castro did not then believe,
nor seems to believe today, that he was urging Khrushchev to carry out a
first strike against the United States. At the same time, both Castro and
Khrushchev believed an American invasion of Cuba to be imminent. Hence, the
"if" does not seem to be much of a qualifier. Accordingly, Khrushchev
interpreted Castro's message as a call for a nuclear first strike. Castro
maintains, however, that even if Khrushchev had done as he (Castro) wished,
it would not have been a "first strike", because the United States would
already have been engaged in an act of aggression against Cuba.

One other point seems worth clearing up. Obviously Cuba accepted huge amounts
of Soviet aid. The record is clear, however, that Cuba was not a "puppet" of
the Soviet Union. In fact, Cuba's independent foreign policy was an almost
constant irritation to the Kremlin. "Client," perhaps; "puppet," no.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 19 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

Brad De Long claims that Cuba 'had a strong and flourishing civil society'
before 1959. I wonder on what sources he is basing
that judgment.

What is very clear about Cuba in the 50s was that the political system had
reached a crisis level due to its corruption and the widespread perception
that politicians did not deliver the main demands of society: independence,
social justice, economic stability and autonomy and political democracy.
Batista produced his coup d'etat in 1952 practically without opposition from
political parties and from many organizations, even though elections were a
few months away and he was certainly not going to win them. The most popular
political party was the PPC (Partido del Pueblo Cubano) which had a clearly
reformist and radical platform with the fight against corruption as its main
priority. But it was not able to muster any strength to oppose Batista
because it was also divided. Havana was rapidly becoming one of the preferred
places for the mob to establish a new 'Las Vegas'. Meyer Lansky and Santos
Trafficante controlled the casinos.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 19 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

On 18 July, "Stephen R. Maynard" <mayn...@bellatlantic.net> wrote:

>I recently saw an article in the _Washington Times_ (Friday, 17 July, 1998,
page A6 "Cuban >exile group asks for
"bombings" retraction") that I believe is relevant to the thread. Dr. Carlos
>Alzugaray wrote about a NY _Times_ article from

Sunday and Monday in which a Cuban exile >(I don't know the name) claimed
that the Cuban American Foundation financed his bombing >campaign in Cuba.
This story is being disputed by Jorge Mas Santos the director of the
>foundation and the son of the former director. Whether or not they did
finance a bombing >campaign I don't know, but after recent troubles in the
media I think we all may want to take a >second look at what see, read, or
hear.

I think Stephen Maynard has a good point.

On the other hand, let me remind him that back in the 60s the Cuban government
made several allegations about plots
organized in the U.S. by the CIA with the complicity of the mob to kill
President Fidel Castro. At the time, these charges were
dismissed as inventions and fabrications, only to be sadly confirmed by the
Senate investigations of the 70s.

As I said in the first posting of this thread, written before the New York
Times articles, these former CIA operatives exist, they were trained in
terrorist tactics, those tactics were used against Cuba in the 60s under
Operation Mongoose and these people continued using them after the CIA closed
those operations in the 70s. The Cuban Government has charged that the string
of terroristic bombings that shook Havana hotels in 1997 and resulted in the
death of an Italian tourist were organized from El Salvador by Mr. Posada
Carriles and financed by the Cuban-American National Foundation. This is
basically what Posada told the New York Times reporters. The newspaper,
contrary to the Tailwind affair by CNN and TIME, has adamantly claimed the
story is true and that it has 13 hours of taped interviews with Posadas, 100
independent witnesses that say the same and FBI and CIA documents which
confirmed it.

If you go to Miami, you will learn also that the CANF exercises a reign of
terror inside the city and that anybody who
opposes her is going to be in trouble. It has happened to The Miami Herald and
to Cubans who disagree with CANF's violent
actions against Cuba.

I would not be surprised if the stories are proven true.

gdpop...@my-dejanews.com

unread,

Oct 10, 1998, 3:00:00 AM10/10/98

Date: 19 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 19 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

In response to Tom Nichols' last posting, let me just point out to him that
there are very good scholars of Soviet policy towards Latin American and of
Cuban Foreign Policy who have written extensively about Cuban-Soviet
relations and Cuba's internationalist policies in Africa. I would recommend
Cole Blasier's _The Giant's Rival: The USSR and Latin America_ (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983); Jorge Domnguez _To Make the World Safe
for Revolution: Cuba's Foreign Policy_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1989), Philip Brenner (American University) and William LeoGrande (American
University) (co-editors)_The Cuba Reader_ (New York: Grove Press, 1989). None
of them would agree with the picture Dr. Nichols gives us of Cuban-Soviet
relations as a patron-client relationship in the sense that he takes it: the
Soviets telling Cuba what to do and Cuba acting immediately. That model could
be applied to the relationship between the U.S. and Cuba before 1959.

As to Dr. Nichols' main charge that Fidel Castro was the only responsible for
the October 1962 nuclear Crisis and that he was trying to provoke a war
between the Soviet Union and the United States, I am afraid that his Cold War
anti-communist vision, profoundly influenced by McCarthysm, simply clouds his
objectivity. Cuba did not request weapons from the U.S.S.R. until the danger
of a U.S. invasion became eminent and it tried to buy weapons from U.S.
allies first, appealing to Moscow only when these countries, under pressure
from Washington, denied the weapons. By the way, in the long exchange between
Christian Herter and Selwyn Lloyd that took place in the second half of 1959,
the British Foreign Secretary told his American counterpart that Cuba would
do exactly what she did, as Nasser had done before. I again call Dr. Nichols
to check the FRUS volume dedicated to Cuba between 1958 and 1960 published by
the State Department in 1991.

Operation Mongoose, designed by General Lansdale at the request of the
Kennedy Administration after the Bay of Pigs fiasco was planned to bring
about the overthrow of the Cuban government by force by October 1962. Dr.
Nichols can check the original documents which are also published in the book
by Blight, Allyn and Welch I cited in a previous posting. Aware of these
plans, Fidel requested further assistance. Khrushchev, believing in that
possibility and taking into account that he had already vouched that Cuba
would be supported by Soviet rocket forces in case, I repeat, in case of a
direct American invasion, decided to propose the placing of the missiles in
Cuba. To make a long story short, all accounts and records confirm that once
accepting the missiles, what Fidel wanted was for Cuba and the Soviet Union
to announce publicly that an agreement in that direction had been signed.
Khrushchev, for reasons that are not yet clear, wanted to announce the
agreement after the rockets were in place, underestimating the capacity of
U.S. intelligence to discover them. Fidel did not make that mistake but
accepted Khrushchev arguments, trusting the capacity of the Soviet military
to do things that way, but not convinced that it was the best.

If the agreement would have been made public, as Fidel suggested, the U.S.
could have done nothing, because Soviet missiles in Cuba were as legal a
American ones in Italy or Turkey. That, of course, unless the U.S. government
was recklessly contemplating an invasion of Cuba at any cost.

But let me ask Dr. Nichols. Given that he does not dispute the fact that the
U.S. was trying to overthrow the Cuban government by every means available
since 1959-1960, what was Fidel supposed to do? Wait and let the invasion
take place without resistance?

Finally, I find Dr. Nichols' interpretation of Marxist theory of international
relations as quite simplistic.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 19 July 1998

From: Vincent K Pollard <pol...@hawaii.edu>

http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/americas/index-posada.html is the URL to
_The New York Times_ story to which one
H-DIPLO subscriber alluded during the past 36 hours.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 20 July 1998

From: DAVID KAISER <KAI...@USNWC.EDU>

Two brief comments in reply to Carlos Alzugaray's last post.

1). The idea that a brutal dictatorship cannot enjoy popular support is, I
regret to say, preposterous. Hitler's regime and
Stalin's regime enjoyed very extensive popular support.

2). In re his comments on Reid Rozen, it is quite possible for an American to
oppose both the Castro regime and U.S. policy towards it, precisely because,
as Reid Rozen points out, the policy has probably helped entrench the regime.
I feel the same way.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 20 July 1998

From: Brad De Long <del...@econ.Berkeley.EDU>

On 19 July, Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu> wrote:

>Brad De Long claims that Cuba 'had a strong and flourishing civil society'
before 1959. I wonder >on what sources he is
basing that judgment.

Why, on the successful organization of a broad front of opposition to the
then-dictator, Batista.

Could a similar broad front of opposition carry out a successful campaign to
unseat a megalomaniac and authoritarian dictator
who had clearly remained too long today?

gdpop...@my-dejanews.com

unread,

Oct 10, 1998, 3:00:00 AM10/10/98

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 20 July 1998

From: Brad De Long <del...@econ.Berkeley.EDU>

On 19 July, Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu> wrote:

>Brad De Long claims that Cuba 'had a strong and flourishing civil society'
before 1959. I wonder >on what sources he is
basing that judgment.

Why, on the successful organization of a broad front of opposition to the
then-dictator, Batista.

Could a similar broad front of opposition carry out a successful campaign to
unseat a megalomaniac and authoritarian dictator
who had clearly remained too long today?

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 20 July 1998

From: Tom Nichols <nich...@concentric.net>

Carlos Alzugaray asks:

>But let me ask Dr. Nichols. Given that he does not dispute the fact that the

U.S. was trying to >overthrow the Cuban government by every means available
since 1959-1960, what was Fidel >supposed to do? Wait and let the invasion
take place without resistance?

Without the missiles, whether the U.S. would have ever supported another
invasion after the disaster at the Bay of Pigs is questionable, in my mind
(if only for domestic political reasons). But putting nuclear weapons in Cuba
increased the "value of the object," so to speak, and practically guaranteed
that the Americans would have to take military action. Khrushchev understood
that what he was doing was in essence making a high stakes bluff, hoping to
realize a quick political gain with a military instrument; Castro, on the
other hand, was willing to see those weapons actually launched. And yes, if
the question is whether to allow an airstrike against Soviet nuclear missiles
or start World War III, I suppose that accepting the airstrike (as the
consequence of a poorly thought out policy) is better than incinerating
millions of people around the world.

>Finally, I find Dr. Nichols' interpretation of Marxist theory of international
relations as quite >simplistic.

I think we would both agree that the essence of Marxism is an understanding
of the world in terms of classes rather than states. Even later interpreters
of Marx have wrestled with the issue of the autonomy of the state and its
value to a Marxist, but it is plain that the state itself has to be regarded
as an outgrowth of the class relationships of the society over which it
governs. (This is fundamental to Marx and to Lenin as well.) As a result,
Marxist thinkers traditionally have viewed the state (and its various
agencies, such as the military and the financial system ) as one of the key
structures in a capitalist environment that maintains the oppressive hand of
one class over another. The international state system is little more than a
fraternity of these capitalist states, all of whom share the common interests
of maintaining the dominance of the ruling class at home, and keeping in
place the predatory international economic system from which they derive
their sustenance.

If that is no longer a central tenet of Marxism, then Marxism has changed so
radically that even *Marx* wouldn't recognize it. Such a view of the
international system leaves little room for participation in any but the most
pragmatic and instrumental way.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 20 July 1998

From: Alexander Mayer <alco...@yahoo.com>

This is the first half of my answer to Carlos Alzugaray.

On 18 July, Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu> wrote:

>In response to the latest posting from Alexander Mayer, let me start by

thanking him for >correcting some of my figures. He did his homework better
than I did and that was my mistake. I >stand corrected. Moreover, it is
encouraging that we at least coincide in one aspect: I think, like >him, that
present sanctions against Cuba are stupid (of course, I also think they were
stupid >before the demise of the Soviet Union and, moreover, illegal and
immoral then and now).

I think that we probably agree on a few more points. Although I was jailed by
the Romanian Communists in 1962-1963, vengeance is not my goal. In
Washington, I have argued in favor of the ending of the embargo, even though
my main interest was the visit of President Constantinescu of Romania to our
nation's capital. Although in his original posting in which he criticized
Nichols (i.e., the one in which he talked about the napalm attack), Carlos
Alzugaray seemed like a professor with a training in Marxism-Leninism, like
the ones that I know from Romania, I must note that I was wrong. Although he
is rather apologetic toward the current Cuban regime, and toward Mao, Ho Chi
Minh, etc., I have had contact with all sorts of apologists of Stalin,
Hitler, Mao, etc., and he is certainly more competent and better informed,
and despite his Marxism-Leninism, more honest than them. This does not make
many of his points "right", but there is every indication that he believes
what he says. This is shown, inter alia, by the fact that he has answered his
critics rather than kept silent, even though he has not answered every single
point.

>Dr. Mayer's data on elections are outdated: after 1993 there were municipal
elections in 1995 >and general (national,
provincial and municipal) in 1997-1998.

I stand corrected.

>Although similar, elections in Cuba are not exactly the same as in Eastern

Europe. Two >essential traits differentiate them: First, the nominating
process starts with town meetings where >proposals for all levels are made.
Explaining the whole process might be too long. If he is >interested I can
send him a direct posting.

I am, and I would also suggest that more details should be available for
other subscribers to H-DIPLO. For this person, I have taken the liberty to
ask a few questions for the purpose of clarification.

>Second, the Party does not participate directly in the nomination process.

Isn't there some sort of "Popular Front" which does that ? Would not that
Popular Front also include the Communist Party, or
at least its members ? Or are some candidates nominated by, let's say, the
workers in factory A, while another one is
nominated by those of factory B ?

>As a matter of fact, the nominating commissions at the provincial and national
levels are formed >by representatives of all
organizations except the Party and the Communist Youth Union.

Would these organizations include, let's say, the Roman Catholic Church ?

>The electoral slates are approved by the municipal assemblies

Why is there a need for such approval ? To keep the "enemies of the people"
from being candidates ? Could a dissident actually become a candidate ?

>...and at least 50% of the nominated candidates must be municipal councilors

Why must at least 50% of the people also be municipal councilors ? In the
France of the Third Republic (and it is by no means my intention to compare a
multi-party democracy with Cuba), many mayors were also deputies. Was that a
good idea ? I would doubt it. And why should the law mandate a certain
percentage, whether in Cuba for elections, or in the U.S. for racial quotas ?
Should not the people perhaps select the best candidate, regardless of
everything else ? Would a person who is a municipal councilor and a member of
the assembly have enough time to take care of his constituents (i.e., in the
area of the petitions) ?

>which are elected in primary elections where there must be at least two and no
more than 8 >candidates for each elected
post.

It's good that it is at least contested, but why should there be no more than
eight candidates ?

>The multiparty elections before the Revolution were notorious for their

fraudulent and unfair >practices.Yet they had one merit, they were
multi-party, and the irregularities were committed by more than one political
group. Moreover, were all the elections fraudulent ?

>(asking the card in exchange for a bed in a hospital or the money to pay for a
funeral were >common practices; another one
was the widespread use of 'botellas' -phoney government jobs- in >exchange for
political support).

I am not aware of the use of these exact practices outside (pre-1959) Cuba,
i.e., in other countries.

>I reject Dr. Mayer's assertion that crimes committed in the name of communism
were consistent >with my ideology.

I would challenge our Cuban colleague to declare that every Communist dictator
who committed crimes should be called by
him and by Cuba, a tyrant, a dictator, and, if they wish, a bad Marxist or
whatever, and that the existence of the crimes should
be accepted.

>They were and are aberrations of an ideology that believes in the redemption of
>humanity

I thought that it was only the proletariat. Well, things change.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 20 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

I don't know if I will be adding to the confusion that David Welch pointed
out in this thread. I generally agree on his points, but with a small
clarification. Robert Pastor, who is both an academic and a former high
official of the Carter administration who had to deal with Cuba and
participated in the conference that Welch, Blight and Allyn organized in
Havana with the participation of Fidel, discussed this issue in a paper
partly published in the _Cuba Reader_ edited by Brenner, Leo-Grande, Donna
Rich and Daniel Siegel (I mentioned this book in a previous posting). He asks
the question if Cuba could be classified partner, proxy, puppet or paladin
and quotes several American specialists. For LeoGrande, Cuba and the Soviet
Union were partners (asymmetrical but reciprocal nonetheless); for Blasier, a
useful alliance; Gonzalez, a Rand corporation analyst, prefers paladin.
Domnguez discusses the issue in his book on Cuban foreign policy and,
although he talks about Soviet hegemony, he ends up calling the relationship
an alliance.

I am giving my American colleagues, Dr. Nichols included, a wide variety of
interpretations from the U.S. which basically differ with his. In fact, very
few specialists on Cuba and the Soviet Union have Dr. Nichols' simplistic
view of the relationship, which might be good for propaganda purposes, but
not for an academic discussion.

Of course, I do not necessarily share these interpretations by American
scholars. I would prefer to call Cuba's relationship with the Soviet Union as
an alliance, with a great degree of coincidence (one might ask if alliances
could be possible without a great degree of coincidence). I do not like the
classification of 'client' that David Welch uses because it implies that Cuba
sometimes was forced into positions it did not share by way of coercion
because of its dependent position. That's not an exact description. Cuba many
times took positions that put the relationship in danger, risking Soviet
reprisals (those almost happened in 1968). My view is that at the end the
Soviet Union had to accept those positions without coercing Cuba, for a
variety of reasons that would make this posting too long.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 21 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

Gregory Alegi has put me in a tight spot. On the one hand, he seems to like
that I am involved in this debate when he says "I feel privileged to have

direct contact with a member of the Cuban civil service, an opportunity I do

not think I could easily have outside H-DIPLO." He also says I am convincing.
Yet he accuses me of transmitting propaganda and telling untruths or "a

rather unoriginal repetition of official Cuban positions."

He says, like Dr. Nichols, that the data I offer about Cuba are 'factoids'.
The interesting thing about this is that my critics, as they cannot refute
the data, try to underestimate it. That's interesting because the U.N., when
judging the social development of any country, uses some of the data I gave
as part of the basic statistics to classify the level attained by any
country.

Behind those facts are human lives. Let me then give Gregory Alegi an example
of what I mean. When my youngest daughter was born in 1972, she was premature
(6 months and half). My wife gave birth at one of the best hospitals in
Havana. It was one of the best before the Revolution and continued to be so.
When my wife left the hospital, our daughter had to stay behind in an
incubator for around a week. Every evening we went to visit her. And every
evening another couple, black and of poor origin, went also to see their
daughter which was also in an incubator. They were both been treated by a
medical team led by one of Cuba's best pediatricians, who, by the way, has
also served his country and humanity as an internationalist doctor in Africa.
We met at the waiting room and as worried parents that we were, we exchanged
opinions, impressions, worries, etc. Little by little we learned that the
black man was a construction worker and his wife a cleaning lady in an
enterprise. I was very proud, because I said to myself that before the
Revolution, my daughter would probably have been treated in the same way,
since my wife and me were from middle or upper middle level families and had
gone to the University and earned our degrees. Yet, the daughter of the other
couple most probably would not have survived. Her parents would not have had
access to that hospital and that medical team. When asked what the Cuban
Revolution means to me, I always recount this story. You may not like, you
may even call it propaganda, but many Cubans know the difference. With that I
think I also reply to Mr. Alegi's insinuation that it might have been better
for Batista to continue ruling Cuba.

Now, to accuse me of propaganda is quite surprising, when Mr. Alegi, of whom
we only know that he is writing from Italy, immediately goes on to quote from
a book called _Il libro nero del comunismo_, a title that sounds very much
like propaganda. Let me set the record straight:

General Ochoa, who was one of the most decorated officers of the Cuban Army
having distinguished himself in the wars of Angola and Ethiopia, was engaged
in minor diamond and ivory smuggling. But he was doing something much worse,
trying to establish links with the Cali cartel. In his trial, he said that he
was doing both things in order to obtain additional funds for the necessities
of his troops and for the country. There did not seem to be an extraordinary
case of corruption because the accounts that were discovered did not have
more than 100,000 dollars. Yet, this petty case of corruption, as compared to
what goes on in other latitudes, was considered so negative in view of the
unblemished record of the Cuban Army in Angola and so dangerous because it
could give the U.S. a very good excuse to intervene militarily in Cuba, that
he was given a very harsh treatment: he was executed, together with his
assistant, an Army Captain.

The MC Department was created with the objective of circumventing the U.S.
embargo of Cuba, especially in certain key equipments Many of them medical)
that were desperately needed. However, the head of the MC department and some
of the officers in it (who were originally Interior Ministry officials), used
the wide authority they were given to engage also in acts of corruption and
in supporting General Ochoa in his attempts to contact the Cali cartel. They
were discovered and two of them were also executed.

I am not going to deny the decision was harsh, but they had put national
security in great danger. Yet, what I have said hardly means that the Cuban
Army in Angola behaved like a conquering army, as is alleged in the book. For
every Cuban army officer or soldier that had to be punished for violation of
the laws of the military code of conduct, there were hundreds of cases of
officers, soldiers and units helping Angolans in many different ways, or
giving their lives to defend that country from South African aggression. If
this sounds like propaganda, then let it sound, but it is the truth, as
recognized by the Angolans and other Africans.

I do not know if the rest of the allegations in Mr. Alegi's posting are
quotations from the _Black Book of Communism_. They
are certainly not from Cuban laws.

gdpop...@my-dejanews.com

unread,

Oct 10, 1998, 3:00:00 AM10/10/98

Date: 21 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

Date: 21 July 1998

From: Tom Nichols <nich...@concentric.net>

At the risk of an overly formal and annotated post, l'd like to point out a
few relevant aspects of the Soviet relationship to Cuba.

Dr. Alzugary prefers to call Cuba's relationship with the USSR an alliance
rather than a patron-client relationship. Yet, at the very beginning of the
relationship, it was clear that the Soviets would hold the economic upper
hand. This may seem like a matter of semantics, but there is a significant
difference between a difficult alliance (like, say, the US and France in the
60s) and a difficult relationship between a patron and a client, as with the
USSR and Cuba.

I don't deny that Cuba occasionally gave Moscow heartburn, but in the end,
the Cuban regime was in deep hock to the Soviets. (As an aside, I did not
characterize the patron-client relationship as he did--one where the junior
partner jumps at orders. Rather, I saw it as one in which the larger power
keeps the smaller power afloat and viable for its own purposes. The existence
of Cuba as a Communist power so close to the U.S. was itself a valuable
propaganda tool and one worth a great deal to Moscow.) Indeed, if Cuba was
able to act independently, it is largely because the symbolic value of Cuban
Communism outweighed Moscow's irritation with Castro.

From the very start, money was an issue; Mikoian mentioned sugar in his
February 1960 visit, and Volkogonov notes that this was evident in the Cuban
overtures to Khrushchev in August 1961:

"Blas Roca brought an important letter to Moscow....Havana was proposing to
proclaim the socialist character of the Cuban revolution and form a Marxist
party, and was asking the Soviet Union to express its solidarity with Cuba
'against attacks and threats of military attack on our country by the United
States.' Khrushchev took special note of the urge of the Cubans to discuss
'ways of co-ordinating our sugar production with demand in the socialist
camp.'" (1)

This is hardly an alliance; this is a quid pro quo between a giant and a very
junior supplicant--We'll join your side, and you buy our sugar at good prices
and thus help stabilize our regime. The Soviets proceeded not only to buy
sugar, but to buy it at ridiculous prices: even in the 1980s, the Cubans were
getting roughly 5 tons of oil for 1 ton of sugar, while on the world market
one ton of sugar would have brought only *3* tons of oil...or, put another
way (if my math is correct) the Soviets were paying a bonus of some 67% on
Cuban sugar. (2)

By 1990 the situation was such that a scholar at the Soviet think tank IMEMO
would write:

"We have turned out to be incapable of leading Cuba down the road of
self-supported growth. It is possible, that instead of a
closed economic regime oriented toward non-market ties with CEMA countries, we
should create an export economy
there....And despite this, it is the largest recipient of our aid." (3)

Cuba held the lion's share--20%--of all Third World debt to the USSR (with
Mongolia and Vietnam next at 12 and 11 percent, respectively). (4) Indeed, it
was not until the early 1980s that Cuba was forced to start taking out
interest-bearing loans to cover the shortfall between sugar exports and oil
imports; Gorbachev's later insistence that aid to Cuba be tied to reforms was
a change which led one Soviet academic to remind the Party leadership of the
previous relationship with Cuba and to note that :

"our relations with Cuba as well as with Nicaragua have not been gauged in
terms of 'expenditures' or 'debts'. Therefore, with an eye toward evaluating
the 'expensive burden' of these relations, in our view, a weighing and
accounting of their place in the overall foreign policy of the USSR should
take place." (5)

Sure sounds like a patron-client relationship to me. In any case, there was no
way that Cuba could claim neutrality; having
thrown in its lot and its own economic survival with the late and unlamented
USSR, Cuba can hardly claim that subsequent
American hostility was unwarranted.

1. D. Volkogonov, _Sem' Vozhdei_, (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), p. 419. I added
this note because readers of Harold Shukman's translation in _Autopsy for an
Empire_ will find it rendered somewhat more innocuously as "Khrushchev read
the translation and marked a number of significant passages..."Castro also
wanted to discuss 'ways of co-ordinating our sugar production with demand in
the socialist camp.'" The original citation, however, reads: "Khrushchev
osobo podcherknul i stremlenie kubantsev obsudit 'puti koordinatsii nashego
proizvodstva sakhara s potrednostiami sotsialisticheskogo lageria," a very
different formulation that indicates that Khrushchev zeroed in on the issue
of sugar prices immediately.

2. V. Piatagorsky, _Moscow News_, May 20-27, 1990, p. 12.

3. E. Aref'eva, _Izvestiia_, April 12, 1990, p. 5.

4. These are Soviet figures. See "Foreign Loan, Aid Figures Published,
Explained," FBIS-SOV-90-043, March 5, 1990, pp.
83-84.

5. A. Glinkin, _Latinskaia Amerika_, May 1989, p. 48.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 21 July 1998

From: Alexander Mayer <alco...@yahoo.com>

This is the second part of my answer to Dr. Alzugaray.

>and puts men's and women's well-being at the center of its philosophical
speculation.

I would say, abstract philosophical speculation. Moreover, I school, and at
the university in Romania, under Communism, the words used were not
"speculation" and "opinion", but "dialectical materialism". Of course,
perhaps our Cuban colleague is to some extent an Euro-Communist or something
like that. He no longer believes in the "dictatorship of the proletariat". I
always wondered how Communists could call the same regime "the dictatorship
of the proletariat" and "people's democracy". Dr. Alzugaray apparently also
believes that dictatorship can not equal democracy, but only disagrees with
us over whether Cuba is a dictatorship.

>Of the additional names he mentions, I will accept only Ceaucescu. I do not
have any evidence >of crimes committed by Ho
Chi Minh or Todor Zhivkov (I lived in Bulgaria between 1965 and >1970). Mao's
Cultural Revolution was an extremist
manifestation of leftist infantilism, but I do >not know enough about the
subject. And, of course, he should prove the
supposed crimes >committed in my country by the present government.

For China and Vietnam, a number of books should be consulted. Edwin E. Moise,
LAND REFORM IN CHINA AND NORTH VIETNAM, (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1983), p. 141-142 proves that Mao Zedong said in 1957 that
the total number of people liquidated by the government's security police
between 1949 and 1954 was 800,000. Dr. Moise estimates that the number of
executions in the countryside during the "land reform" campaign was 1-1.5
million people. Some, such as Daniel E. Teodoru, would use larger numbers.
From October 10, 1950 until August 10, 1951, 28,322 people were executed in
Guandong province during the land reform campaign. Some people were jailed
without being executed (in the Central-South Region of China, only 28% of
those who "were found" guilty of exploiting the people or whatever were
executed, 2% had stays of execution, and 50% were prisoners engaged in forced
labor (see ibid, p. 141-142).

I believe that in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh admitted in a press interview that
10-15,000 "landlords", or something like that, were killed during the "land
reform" campaign. If Dr. Alzugaray would like the figures for Romania under
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, I would be glad to post them. And I have a question:
was Zhivkov innocent of the Stalinist crimes during the Stalinist (i.e.,
Chervenkov) period. Was Honnecker not convicted of what our Cuban colleagues
claims are crimes against the principles of Marxism-Leninism ? After the 1956
Revolution in Hungary, were not some youngsters kept in jail until they
reached eighteen years of age, and after that executed ? I could go on and
on. I have seen a picture of counter-revolutionaries being shot for their
crimes, and they were certainly more than two of them. The issue of
repression in Cuba is dealt with by Dr. Alegi in his posting from July 19,
1998.

>By the way, I have lived in police states, Batista's Cuba before 1959 and
Videla's Argentina >between 1976 and 1977, and
know perfectly well the difference.

Marshal Ion Antonescu's regime was not believed to be a police state by the
Romanians who agreed with the dictator's policies, or disagreed with them
through memoranda, petitions, semi-censored newspapers, etc. Yet even those
who evaluate him positively accept the fact that he was a dictator. The
evidence presented by our Cuban colleague would support the contention that
Cuba is better off than it would have been under Batista, which might be
somewhat true in certain respects, which ignores the democratization of the
other Latin American countries.

>A characteristic of this discussion is that crimes are attributed to any and
all communists without >irreversible empirical
evidence.

Or, more accurately, such evidence is not published in Cuba. Of course, I
have not argued that all Communists (including our Cuban colleague) are
guilty of crimes. I do not know what crimes were committed, for example, by
Gross, Kadar's successor as the leader of the Hungarian Communist Party. And
then, again, three of those tried at Nuremberg in 1945-1946 were exonerated,
which does not prove that Naziism was good.

>Yet the crimes committed by pro-Western dictatorships, in the name of Christian
values and the >protection of capitalist
orders, like those which took place in the 1970's and 1980's in Argentina >and
Chile are conveniently ignored.

I do not ignore them, yet Cuba's "deficiencies" were in my view only partly
in the area of human rights. They were partly in the fact that it was allied
with the Soviet Union, as long as it existed. The Soviet were the enemy, and
Cuba somehow got on the side of the enemies of the U.S. Of course, after
5,000 people were killed in connection with Tiananmenh Square in China, it
would be ridiculous to perceive China as "worse" in the area of human rights
in comparison to Cuba. The most that I can say is that the Chinese
Nationalists might have killed more people than the Chinese Communists.

>Dr. Mayer seems to argue that the data I gave on Cuban social achievements,
which he >corrects but accepts only in part
(he implies that Cuba might be somehow doctoring them >because Ceaucescu did
so),

I will interpret this statement as a denial that Castro doctored statistics.

If one looks at the declining life expectancy in post-Communist Russia, they
certainly are. The Communists were always good at fighting illiteracy, and I
do not deny the social achievements of the Castro regime, even though
sometimes the friends of the regime exaggerate them a little in absolute and
relative terms. I only wonder how impressive the economic achievements were,
about the recent return of prostitution in the streets of Havana (which I am
sure that Castro does not like), etc.

I have some sources on how the economic situation under the pre-Castro
governments was not so bad as it is often claimed,
but I have to find them.

>Now there's free compulsory education for everyone up to 6th. grade. All
children 6 through 11 >years old go to school as
92% of those in the 12-14 age group do.

Perhaps an inadvertent mistake with the numbers has been made. This is not to
deny the achievements of Castro, Ceausescu, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini,
and King Carol II of Romania as dictator in the area of education.

>There are no 'children in the streets' nor 'child labor' in Cuba, although
these are problems for >most if not all Latin American
and Caribbean countries.

And, to a small extent, for the U.S. The question is: does Argentina have
these problems ? How about Puerto Rico ?

I will not comment on every statistic, although I have seen slightly different
numbers. Let us admit Cuba's merit in these areas,
even if it is sometimes exaggerated by a little bit.

>He seems almost eager to show that Cuban health care is not good enough.

It is quite good for a country of Cuba's level of economic development. I
would also add that, for example, Romanian doctors, during and after
Communism, have been better diagnosticians than American ones. The end of
Communism did not somehow make them less good diagnosticians, and life
expectancy has increased after 1989. Would our Cuban colleague argue that the
fall of Communism would bring a collapse of the health care system ?

>It is recognized by the international medical community that Cuba's efforts in
developing a vaccine against the AIDS virus are
among the most advanced in the World.

This is true.

>Since, from his postings, I believe Dr. Mayer to be a sensitive person to human
suffering,

I have always hoped that I would be one. I do not know how sensitive I am,
but I have never tried to be less sensitive than I was. I have always
wondered how much humanity survived in those Communist bullies who beat me up
in jail, in 1962-1963. A scar over my left eye dating from that time is
indeed a monument to the "civilization" of the twentieth century.
Solzhenitsyn has said that in Shakespearean times, a king could only kill a
few people. That was before the appearance of ideologies, in whose name
millions of people have been killed.

>the only thing for me to do right now is to invite him to Cuba and request that

he particularly >visits the special schools we have for handicapped children,
a system of institutions that the >European Union has earmarked for support
with humanitarian aid through well-known NGOs >because of the difficulties we
are encountering to maintain them after 1989, or the health care

>resort of Tarara in the outskirts of La Habana, where 500 Ukrainian children
suffering from the >consequences of the
Chernobyl disaster are been taken care at a time.

I would have to politely refuse. I am sixty-seven years old, and not in very
good health. If I would have been younger, I would
have accepted the offer, but I would have also insisted on meeting with
dissidents, to see some of the 400-2,500 political
prisoners in jails, etc.

I have observed ever since the beginning that Mr. Alzugaray has an e-mail
address from the Cuban Foreign Ministry. I do not know his relationship with
the Cuban Foreign Ministry, but I was wondering whether his arguments
represent only his private views, or also the point of view of the Foreign
Ministry. If they would also represent the point of view of the government, I
believe that we have witnessed a few steps in the change for the better in
Cuba. My aim is to let the rulers of Cuba to understand that they will slowly
have to democractize their country. In this way, they can save their skins,
their party can remain viable in a multi-party system, the dislocations of a
revolution would be avoided, and the social programs instituted by Castro
would be preserved against would-be "excessive privatizers". Moreover, I am
afraid that the embargo is not going to be lifted until more steps are going
to be taken in the direction of democratization, which is not to deny that
Cuba's record on human rights has improved. How can democratization be
achieved ? Perhaps a few opposition deputies could be elected, a few
political prisoners could be released, a few foreign Communist leaders guilty
of crimes be condemned, etc. And then, gradually, things could change for the
better. It is in the long-term interest of the Cuban regime for the
opposition to come from inside Cuba rather than for opposition political
parties contesting the elections to be created from the Cuban diaspora, like
it happened, to some extent, in the beginning, in the case of Romania. If the
latter thing will happen, there will be a polarizing dichotomy between the
Communist leadership and its die-hard opponents. This would be good neither
for the regime, the country nor the Cuban people. The issue is who is going
to fill the vacuum. Moreover, if Castro is so popular, why is the regime so
afraid to have multi-party elections ? Because of ideology ? It should also
be remembered that Ceausescu was quite popular, or acceptable, in Romania in
1968, and even in 1976, and we all know what happened in 1989.

On December 10, 1989, at an anti-Ceausescu rally in New York City, there was
some talk of a new one month later. I said to myself that I had a feeling
that Ceausescu would fall in the meantime, and I was right.

In a few years, Castro will also go to the garbage can of history, one way or
another, and by 2010, Cuba will be a fairly
democratic, multi-party country.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 22 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

Tom Nichols' last posting demonstrates, if there was any doubt, that there is
practically nothing on which we can agree. We
both tried, but we could not.

However, let me say just two things. First, obviously Dr. Nichols is
suggesting that Cuba should have committed collective suicide or accepted
American hegemony, but that we had no right to defend ourselves or to think
how best to defend ourselves. That's quite an outstanding position. He
persistently tries to describe Fidel Castro as a would be genocide because he
was suggesting to Khrushchev that IF, and I underline IF, there was concrete
evidence of an American invasion, the Soviet Union should have no doubt in
launching a preemptive nuclear attack because nuclear war was inevitable. The
most surprising thing about this is that Dr. Nichols is defending this
position from the stand point of the supposedly superior moral character of
the American government. Now, if we take a close look at history, it is the
American government the only government on earth which has actually used
nuclear weapons to annihilate hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you ask me, there is no reason, absolutely no
reason, for that genocide to have been committed.

[Moderator's Note: Several H-DIPLO discussion threads on the the use of the
atomic bomb are archived on our web site, at
<http://h-net2.msu.edu/~diplo/essays.htm>.]

As to his misrepresentation of the Marxist theory of international relations,
let me just say that it looks quite similar to the view expounded by Soviet
dogmatic thinking of the thirties. Like Fred Halliday, the leading Marxist
theoretician in the field, I think that theoretical diversity is a strength
and not a weakness of any discipline. Dr. Nichols should know by now that
there are different Marxist approaches to the theory of international
relations. As to the practice of foreign policy, Marxists governments have
long accepted the basic rules established by international law. Violations,
there have been, but those have also come from U.S. and Western governments.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 22 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

In response to Brad DeLong's assertion that the overthrow of Batista by a
broad front is a demonstration of the existence of a vigorous civil society
in Cuba, let me point out to him that the demise of the dictatorship and, in
the process, of the pre-revolutionary Cuban political system, was the result
of the combined struggle of Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra, who defeated
the backbone of the Batista regime, its Army, and the resistance in the
cities. The latter took the form of violent actions like tha assault on the
Presidential Palace in March 1957, the uprising of the city in Cienfuegos in
September 1957 and the April 1958 strike. All these activities were carried
out basically by the revolutionary organizations: the July 26th Movement or
the Revolutionary Students Directorate. Both of them were founded around
1955-56, among other reasons, because the political parties and the rest of
the civic organizations had not been able to muster enough courage and
decision to oppose openly the regime. An interesting thing about these
organizations was that their membership and leadership came from the younger
generations, men and women in their 20s and 30s. While civil organizations
were mostly led and integrated by people of older generations.

Around February 1956, Fidel Castro and the leadership of the July 26th
Movement decided to create the Movimiento de Resistencia Cvica (Civic
Resistance Movement) with the idea of movilizing different sectors of the
middle and upper classes in support of the coming struggle. The Movement
acquired impetus later on and became nation wide after the signing of the
Caracas Pact on July 31 1958, by almost all political parties and
professional organizations, with the exception of the Communists. During all
that period it was led by cadres from the July 26th Movement.

So although I would agree with DeLong that the overthrow of Batista was
partially the result of the civil society resistance, the decisive part
played in its inception, catalization and consolidarion by the Rebel Army
leadership in the Sierra Maestra cannot be ignored. It is also true that
without that important ingredient the Movement led by Fidel could not have
defeated the dictatorship.

By the way, the State Department documents published in the FRUS collection
for the period, which I have already quoted in this thread, show how little
did the U.S. know about these developments. That's one of the reasons why at
the end of 1957 and beginning of 1958 U.S. officials adopted an electoral
strategy to guarantee the transmission of power from Batista to his chosen
heir, not imagining that the end was so close and that there was no electoral
way out of the Cuban quagmire in 1958. The successful kidnapping of American
marines in July 1958 to call attention to the furnishing of bombs for
Batista's air force at Guantanamo after the State Department announced its
embargo of armaments to the dictatorship, the defeat of the Army's summer
offensive and the signing of the Caracas Pact in July 1958 convinced the
American diplomats that there was no electoral way out, but they could not
design a new strategy until december 1958 when first William Pawley and the
Ambassador Smith told Batista he had to go and the CIA made four attempts to
find a 'third force' or 'third man' to support in order to stop Fidel from
assuming power. But it was too late.

gdpop...@my-dejanews.com

unread,

Oct 10, 1998, 3:00:00 AM10/10/98

Date: 22 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 22 July 1998

From: Tom Nichols <nich...@concentric.net>

Carlos Alzugaray is right, we have reached an impasse. I would add that I do
not suggest that the Cubans should have committed suicide; rather, I was
suggesting that they were faced with two unpleasant prospects (limited air
strikes or all-out nuclear war) because of a situation in which Fidel had so
recklessly placed them.

One last question, then. Alzugaray writes:

>As to his misrepresentation of the Marxist theory of international relations,

let me just say that it >looks quite similar to the view expounded by Soviet
dogmatic thinking of the thirties. Like Fred >Halliday, the leading Marxist
theoretician in the field, I think that theoretical diversity is a >strength
and not a weakness of any discipline. Dr. Nichols should know by now that
there are >different Marxist approaches to the theory of international
relations.

This might be the first time anyone has mistaken me for a Stalinist, but
Alzugaray is avoiding the question:

Is "Marxism," by its very nature, a way of perceiving the world as the
history of the struggle of opposing classes or isn't it? Does the state
reflect the underlying class relations in society or doesn't it?

If "Marxism" is now to be understood as having a state-centric view of
political life, and an essentially status quo (that is, non-revolutionary)
view of the international state system, then it is, I repeat, a "Marxism"
that even Marx would not recognize. I doubt many modern Marxists--dwindling
in number though they are--would recognize it as the Marxism in which they
were schooled. Indeed, it is only a Marxist dictatorship, holding the reins
of state power, that could be so enamoured of the state and its institutions.
Perhaps that explains this rather unusual Cuban innovation in traditional
Marxist thinking.

In closing, I would add that it is refreshing to hear that Marxism is now to
be characterized by "diversity," even if it is too late to save the millions
sent to their graves in Russia, China, Southeast Asia and elsewhere for
various kinds of theoretical deviations.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 22 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

In response to Tom Nichols' last posting on this thread, I must start by
saying that our debate has really turned into what we call in Cuba a
'dialogue between deaf persons'. (I have liberally translated from the
Spanish, although probably there is a similar expression in English). I must
say that I also have the impression that basically he is the deaf one in our
debate. Although I have tried to address almost all of his assertions, he
simply ignores mine. His last posting is a clear example.

His main argument has basically been that the U.S. was right all along in
trying to overthrow the Cuban government by any means available, even by a
direct military intervention, because Cuba had allied herself and thrown her
lot with the Soviet Union, a fact that automatically made us enemies and
justified any means. He has cited specifically the October 1962 crisis over
the missiles.

In his last posting he makes the same argument quoting profusely from Soviet
sources. These quotes, according to his interpretation, demonstrate that
Cuba, without any reason at all or without any provocation from the U.S.,
allied herself with the Soviet Union around that date with the clear intent
of endangering U.S. security. There is only one problem, all his sources are
from 1960 and 1961.

What I have been saying is that the origin of the Cuba-U.S. conflict was not
Cuba's alliance with the Soviet Union in the early 60s, but the inability of
the U.S. to accept a Revolution in Cuba which had changed the semicolonial
status of my country under U.S. hegemony or domination and turned her into a
really independent country in 1959. In support of what I am arguing, let me
quote the description of U.S. policy towards Cuba in 1959 given by Livingston
Merchant, Under Secretary of State, and Roy Rubottom, Assistant Secretary of
State for Interamerican Affairs, at a National Security Council meeting
dedicated to the issue of Cuban policy, which took place 14 January 1960 at
the White House:

'Mr. Merchant characterized the Cuban problem as the most difficult and
dangerous in all the history of our relations with Latin America, possibly in
all our foreign relations. .... The Department of State had been working with
CIA on Cuban problems. Our present objective was to adjust all our actions in
such a way as to acclerate the development of an opposition in Cuba which
would bring about a change in the Cuban Government, resulting in a new
government favourable to U.S. interests. Mr. Merchant then called on Mr.
Rubottom.

....

'Mr. Rubottom then summarized U.S.-Cuban relations since January. He said the
period from January to March might be characterized as the honeymoon period
of the Castro Government. In April a downward trend in U.S.-Cuban relations
had been evident, partly because of the preparation by Cuba of filibustering
expeditions against the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Panama. In June we
had reached the decision that it was not possible to achive our objetives
with Castro in power and had agreed to undertake the program referred to by
Mr. Merchant. In July and August we had been busy drawing up a program to
replace Castro. However, some U.S. companies reported to us during this time
that they were making some progress in negotiations, a factor which caused us
to slow the implementation of our program. The hope expressed by these
companies did not materialize. ... On October 31, in agreement with CIA, the
Department had recommended to the President approval of a program along the
lines referred to by Mr. Merchant. The approved program authorized us to
support elements in Cuba opposed to the Castro Government while making
Castro's downfall seem to be the result of his own mistakes.

'With respect to arms shipments into Cuba, Mr. Rubottom reported that the
U.S. had reasonable effective cooperation from other Free World countries.
The British, for example, had held up a shipment of jet aircraft'. (_Foreign

Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba_, Washington:

United States Government Printing Office, 1991, pp. 742-43).

In my opinion this long quotation illustrates perfectly well my basic points:

A) The U.S. decided it could not live with the Cuban Government at some time
between April and June 1959. Between June and October different plans were
considered but by October 1959 it was proposed to overthrow it.

B) The method to achieve that end, as Iris Bowory has said in a previous
posting, was a Guatemala-type operation, similar to
the one taken against that country by the CIA in 1954.

C) Although planning to overthrow the Cuban Government by a covert (but
violent) operation, the U.S. Government was doing everything possible to stop
the Cuba Government from acquiring the weapons it needed to defend itself
agains such an operation.

D) The motive for that decision was not a Cuban-Soviet alliance, as Tom
Nichols has been asserting all of the time. Two other motives are clearly
identified in this quotation: Cuba's support for revolutionary movements
seeking the overthrow of dictatorships in the Dominican Republic and
Nicaragua and of the lawful Panamanian government and Cuban decisions
relating to U.S. business interests in the Island.

On these two issues let me clarify. Revolutionary expeditions against
dictatorial governments coming from other countries were a common thing in
the Caribbean and Central American area at the time, Jose Figueres of Costa
Rica been one of the democratically elected Central American Presidents who
practiced it against dictator Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. Dictator
Trujillo of the Dominican Republic had been intent on overthrowing the Cuban
government since February, organizing his own anti-Cuban expedition several
months before the U.S. followed suit. The expedition to Panama, which took
place some time in April, was disarmed and disintegrated by an OAS commission
in which Cuban and U.S. officials participated. The State Department at the
time publicly recognized Cuban cooperation. During May, the U.S. received
private and public assurances from the Cuban side that those expeditions
would not be repeated and that Cuba would limit itself to give sanctuary to
revolutionaries fleeing dictatorships. After that there was only one
expedition against the Dominican Republic in July, as there was one Dominican
expedition against Cuba around that time. Both of them were quickly
suppressed by security forces.

It can obviously be concluded that in October, when the decision to overthrow
the Cuban Government was confirmed, there
was only one issue separating both government: the issue of the business
interests affected by the Agrarian Reform Law in
place since May 1959. Mr. Rubottom himself admits that the business interests'
perception that there could be an agreement
with the Cuban Government delayed the decision, which leads to the conclusion
that this question was the most important for
the Government in the second half of 1959.

Dr. Nichols insists in making a big deal about Soviet aid to Cuba. Let me
also clarify, when the trade agreements were negotiated for the first time in
1963, it was decided, by mutual accord, that Cuban sugar prices would be
indexed and reflect the change in the prices of Soviet exports to Cuba. This
was a way of overcoming the difficulty that every underdeveloped country,
which bases its foreign trade in the export of one or two basic commodities,
faces. The solution given was considered fair, but it took every year a lot
of effort to negotiate those prices.

Nevertheless, I recognize that Cuba was in a privileged position as a
recipient of Soviet aid. No other country enjoyed such support. But, of
course, this is not a practice that is unknown to the U.S. and other Western
nations, if we take into account for example the amount of aid that Israel
and Egypt receive.

My personal opinion is that the result of that position was not totally good
for Cuba. We became accustomed to such a situation and we created a new
dependency which cost us dearly with the demise of the Soviet Union. We
should have known better and we should have used better that aid.

But let me point out an important difference between the situation of
Cuban-Soviet relations and U.S.-Cuban relations before 1959. The U.S. openly
and extensively intervened in Cuban internal affairs when we were under its
hegemony. That intervention was resented by Cubans. The Soviets (and the
Chinese) attempted to do something of the sort in the 60s, but they were
strongly rebuffed by the Cuban leadership in the case of the 'micro-fraction'
inside the Party in 1968. They never attempted that after that date. They
respected Cuba, they treated Cuba as a partner and when we told them we could
not accept their position on any subject, they simply accepted it and did not
try to coerce us, economically or politically into adopting any other
position. The Soviet leadership in the 60s, for all their shortcomings in
other fields, was more sensitive to our nationalism than previous and future
American governments.

In any case, the quotations Dr. Nichols uses from Volkogonov, whose
impartiality on this issue is at least suspect, do not demonstrate his point,
as is the case with the other quotations. Although my Russian is quite
elementary (I know Bulgarian but have not finished the different Russian
courses I have studied), I can see the difference between the original and
the English translation. Yet, I think there are other possible
interpretations to Volkogonov's. After all, the Soviet Union bought Cuban
sugar before the Revolution, although not in the quantities that it did
after. This means that there was a need for additional quantities of sugar in
the Soviet market. What Cuba was proposing was a guaranteed quantity of sugar
in exchange for Soviet products, which, lets be frank, did not have much of a
market outside the CMEA. So the agreement in itself had significant economic
benefits for the U.S.S.R.

Another factor not mentioned by Tom Nichols is that when Cuba proposed that
agreement to the Soviet Union, the U.S.
Congress had already approved giving President Eisenhower authority to cut
Cuba's sugar quota in the U.S. market overnight.
Again, I must ask Dr. Nichols what was the Government of Cuba supposed to do:
accept American blackmail and renounce
to its recently acquired independent course in economic policy or permit an
economic situation which would bring suffering to
the Cuban people? It was logical that Cuba would seek new markets for its
products if she was coerced economically.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 23 July 1998

From: Tom Nichols <nich...@concentric.net>

Tim Naftali has cogently raised the point that I avoided, the issue of the
actual nature of the Cuban revolution. (I avoided it
because I didn't want to go around and around about the minutiae of the 1959
Cuban inner circle with Carlos Alzugaray.) I
think Naftali's post makes clear that this was not nearly as visceral or
unthinking a reaction in Washington as it has so far been
presented.

But I repeat: even if we were to *accept* the idea that American hostility to
the Cuban revolution was irrational or an
overreaction, that still does not justify the massive escalation the Soviet
missiles represented. Whatever small justice there
might be in Cuban claims of American hostility between 1959-1962 is to me
obliterated both by Cuba's decision to place
itself right on the front lines of the Cold War, and then by Castro's
willingness to launch a nuclear war.

Cuba, after 1961, was a Soviet ally. (I have used the word "client," but I
will accept Alzugaray's stronger term here.) In any case, there's a price to
be paid for that. The Cuban government should accept the consequences of its
own decisions a bit more stoically, in my opinion.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 23 July 1998

From: Timothy Naftali <timothy...@yale.edu>

The debate between Mr. Alzugaray and Tom Nichols over the nature of the
Soviet-Cuban relationship seems to turn on what came first, the Cuban
alliance with Moscow or Washington's decision to give up on the new Castro
regime in 1959. In "One Hell of a Gamble" Aleksandr Fursenko and I quoted
from Politburo records indicating that the communist "microfaction" of the
July 26th movement requested help from Moscow in April 1959, when Raul Castro
sent a representative, Lazaro Pena, to the Kremlin to seek the assistance of
old Spanish republicans who had graduated from Soviet military academies.
Raul wanted these men to come to Cuba secretly to "help the Cuban army... on
general matters and for the organization of intelligence work." This was
DURING Fidel's fabled first visit to the US as Cuban leader. I believe that
Mr. Alzugaray is correct in disputing the long-held American belief that
Fidel Castro was a Soviet puppet. But Mr. Alzugaray cannot have it both ways.
He ought to admit (if he knows this) that there was a group around Fidel who
looked forward to a second revolution in 1959 and who sought Soviet
assistance to transform the anti-colonial and bourgeois July 26 movement into
an extension of the PSP (the Cuban communist Party). This second revolution
would be, by definition, pro-Soviet and anti-American. As Soviet-era
documents make clear both Raul Castro and Che Guevara were already members of
the PSP at the time that Fidel Castro achieved power and were leaders of this
microfaction. The sources for Soviet materials were Raul Castro, Che himself
and Blas Roca.

For too long, the discussion of the origins of Soviet-Cuban relations has
hinged on assessments of Washington politics. This was ethnocentric and a
product of naval-gazing. There were important events dictated, shaped and
inspired by the Cubans themselves. Havana politics -- the contest within the
July 26th movement -- are as important as the US Congress's decision to kill
the sugar quota to understanding why Fidel Castro announced to the PSP and
the Kremlin in November 1960, five months before the Bay of Pigs, that Moscow
would be his guide.

Unfortunately Cuban papers on the important 1959-60 period are unavailable.
But the Soviet record makes clear that just as there were influential
Americans who never intended to get along with an independently-minded Cuban
leader, there were powerful Cubans who never had any desire to work with a
Capitalist America. It doesn't really matter who wrote which document first.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 23 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

This might be the last or at least one of my last postings in response to Tom
Nichols. It's not that I do not like the debate but it
is really taking a lot of time away from my own academic responsibilities.

Any theory, if it wants to survive, must evolve. One of the big mistakes
committed in Stalin's time was to renounce the
possibility of new approaches in theory. Others were to make theory a
subservient of policy and to maintain an extremely
dogmatic and schematic approach to theoretical questions.

Yes, I still believe the class struggle to be one of the main motors of
history. But it would be stupid not to consider the changes in class
structures which technological innovation brought with it nor the fact that
if capitalism still stands today is because capitalist states, in order to
preserve the system and sometimes for fear of revolution, have introduced
many reforms of socialist origin. Besides, globalization, which Marx and
Engels aptly described in a passage from _The Communist Manifesto_ 150 years
ago as both a cilizatory process and as a development of capitalism with all
its contradictions, also changes the conditions of the class struggle. States
reflect their internal class structure and the balance of forces of their
societies. Their foreign policy is therefore class oriented, but to ignore
the weight of nationalism is ridiculous. Unfortunately the scientific
analysis of nationalism was one of Marxism's early deficits, maybe because it
was one of the problems in which Stalin put directly his hands. But, then
again, nationalism is one of those phenomena which confounds theoreticians
from all schools, again and again.

So my answer is, Marxists in general do not have a state-centric approach to
political life. But perhaps one of the pardoxes is that an ideology that
called for the withering away of the state, has produced governments which
tend to strengthen the state. Of course, most socialist states were born
inmersed in an international class struggle (foreign intervention in the
Russian civil war; U.S. hostility towards Cuba in support of the displaced
Cuban oligarcy) and they had to defend themselves. If Dr. Nichols thinks that
class is not important, then look at the Helms-Burton Bill, which makes the
return of property to their former owners the basis of any future normal
relations between Cuba and the United States. In fact, the U.S. government is
making the restablishment of the class structure in the Cuban society of the
past its basic policy objective in Cuba.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 23 July 1998

From: James Hershberg <jhe...@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>

I don't wish to delve into the substance of the ongoing dispute over
Soviet-Cuban ties during the Cold War, but invite the participants to look
over the extensive documentation on the subject which appeared in issue 8/9
(Winter 1996/97) of the Cold War International History Project Bulletin,
including evidence from Russian and East German archives pertaining to the
Cuban Missile Crisis, Cuban policy in Africa, the Angola and Horn of Africa
Crises, and US-Cuban relations. I'd be curious to hear whether the
communist-bloc evidence influences the view of the disputants. Personally,
having closely looked over the material as editor, I found it tends to
support the view that Havana frequently acted for its own purposes in a
manner which coincided with Soviet interests or aims, not because Moscow told
it to do so, marionette-style, as Washington usually depicted the
relationship. But obviously, the sources in Moscow are only just beginning to
creep open, and in Havana even far more slowly are scholars gaining access to
relevant material, particularly outsiders. If our Cuban scholar's contention
is correct (that Cuba acted independently in foreign affairs, not as a
Kremlin puppet or stooge), this is especially unfortunate and self-defeating.

gdpop...@my-dejanews.com

unread,

Oct 10, 1998, 3:00:00 AM10/10/98

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 23 July 1998

From: James Hershberg <jhe...@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 23 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

In response to Alexander Mayer's two-part posting I will endeavor to write a
short answer. As I have written in a previous posting, much as I like the
present debate, time (that 'relentless enemy' in the words of one of Cuba's
best known song-writers and singers, Pablo Milanes) is pressing me into other
responsibilities which I have to deal with. So maybe this will be one of the
last if not the last posting from me in this thread.

I will start by saying that I must thank Dr. Mayer for some of the adjectives
he has used with respect to my postings and myself. They are quite
undeserved. I am a member of the Cuban Communist Party and as he should know,
the main organizing principle of such a Party is democratic centralism, which
means that inside the party organs I can discuss everything until a decision
is taken, after which I must defend that position at all times. His confusion
in calling me an Eurocommunist might stem from the fact that Soviet and
Eastern European stereotypes of Communism were prevalent among Western
sovietologists. The CCP is not a dogmatic party, it stimulates debate and
does not believe in the subservience of social science to politics. It would
be surprising to know that in these difficult times we are publishing more
intellectual journals than ever before and that in those journals the most
incredible debates are taking place today. Of course, for the international
media, avid as it is in news that sell, that fact is rather insignificant. On
the other side, debate is in our character. It is said that where there are
three Cubans there probably will be four different opinions about anything.

That description can allow me to say that the opinions expressed herein are my
own and do not necessarily reflect my
government's position, adding that I feel no compulsion in accepting that they
are very close.

Dr. Mayer has done his homework once more and dectected that my email address
belongs to a Foreign Ministry server. Yes, I am a Foreign Service officer who
entered Cuba's diplomatic corps in 1961. I have served in Cuban Embassies or
Consulates in Tokyo, Sofia, Buenos Aires, Montreal, Addis Abeba and Brussels.
But since 1982 I am also Adjunct professor at the Instituto Superior de
Relaciones Internacionales (our Foreign Service Institute or Diplomatic
Academy) and at the University of Havana, where I teach Cuban Foreign Policy,
U.S. Foreign Policy, Latin American International Relations and European
Integration. Since returning from my last Foreign Service post I became a
full-time professor at the Institute and I am know finishing my doctorate on
Cuban-U.S. relations, what else.

Let me give some short answers to Dr. Mayer's questions and concerns:

No, there's nor Fatherland or Popular Front in Cuba as there existed in most
Eastern European socialist countries. No, the Catholic Church is not involved
in the nominating process, although there are at least 2 Protestant priests
who are National Assembly Deputies. The idea that the municipal assembly
approves the nomination slate is to guarantee as much participation as
possible in the process by democratically elected bodies. In theory, there is
nothing against a dissident being nominated, but the event is highly unlikely
because he or she would have to be elected first at the municipal level and
in general these assemblies want people who take care of their problems. The
idea behind the system is for people from all walks of life to be
represented. That's why the Assembly right now includes, known intellectuals,
song-writers, poets, professors, students, workers, peasants as well as
professional political cadres.

As Dr. Mayer knows no system guarantees that the best are the ones elected nor
that there is a real choice, except maybe in
Western Europe. Take the U.S., for example. If you want to be elected you
basically need two conditions: ridiculously high
amounts of money to pay for TV time and the support of one of the two parties.
Rarely is an independent elected in the U.S.
Moreover, as Dr. Mayer and I know, the percentage of incumbents getting
reelected hovers between 70 and 90% in the U.S.
Congress. In Miami, Cuban-American congresspersons, Ileana Ross-Lehtinen and
Lincoln Daz-Balart ran unopposed in the
last elections.

It seems that for Dr. Mayer the overriding 'virtue' of any election is that
they are multiparty, notwithstanding the shortcomings I pointed out above,
but he doesn't seem to worry so much about fraud if the previous condition is
present. Frankly, I disagree. I won't go again into what used to happen in
Cuba before the Revolution. It was basically a disgrace. Not only fraud was
very common, but the normal thing would be for candidates to run on a
platform and forget all about it when got to power. Ramon Grau San Martin, a
former professor of medicine at the University of Havana in the 20s who
played and important role in the Revolution of 1933 became President in the
1944 elections as candidate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party -Autnticos- (my
father was this party's representative at the Supreme electoral commission,
but he resigned shortly thereafter when he realized the corruption of the
government). His government, which had promised reforms and independence,
abandoned all these pledges and dedicated all its efforts to enriching its
members. The case of his Minister of Education, Aleman, is well known in
Cuba. He used to visit Miami often and he would go to the National Treasury
before leaving and grab as many dollars as he could put his hands on. Most of
this money served to increase his personal fortune by way of investments in
Miami real estate.

Dr. Mayer often refers to his personal experience under the Communist regimen
in Romania in 1962-1963. I have no reason to question his account of tortures
and mistreatment. As a matter of fact, Cuba withdrew the students it had at
the Petroleum Institute in Romania back in 1967 after Ceaucescu's police
brutally repressed them for a demonstration they organized in Bucarest. Of
course, to be frank, probably Dr. Mayer will not like about what they were
demonstrating: they were opposing U.S. support for Israel during the 1967
war.

But, as he has something to tell us about the brutality of Ceaucescu's
regime, I can also tell him about Batista's brutality. One of my father's
best friends, Dr. Pelayo Cuervo, who had been a peaceful politician all his
life and been elected a Senator in the 1948 elections, was murdered in 1957.
He was arrested by the police and his body, riddled with bullets and showing
clear signs of torture, was found in the outskirts of La Habana. His only
crimes: he had been opposed to Batista for a long time and he had defended
the nationalization of the Cuban Telephone Company, a subsidiary of ITT. By
the way, if anybody has watched The Godfather, part II, it would be
remembered that there is a scene when a group of mafiosi presents Batista
with a gold telephone for services rendered to them. Well, as usually happens
in Hollywood films, the story is only partly true. A golden telephone was
actually presented to Batista for services rendered, but not by a bunch of
hoodlums, but by the respectable executives of the Cuban Telephone Company
after his government had approved a price hike in telephone charges,
something that Pelayo Cuervo, among others, strongly criticized as an
unwarranted concession to a foreign company.

Why do I recall this true stroy? Well, because in the second part of his
posting Dr. Mayer seems to question the utter malignancy of Batista's regime:

>The evidence presented by our Cuban colleague would support the contention that
Cuba is >better off than it would have
been under Batista, which might be somewhat true in certain >respects, which
ignores the democratization of the other Latin
American <countries.

I certainly applaud the democratization of the other Latin American
countries, but I cannot but wonder where would Latin America and the
Caribbean be if the Cuban Revolution had not taken place. The Alliance for
Progress, for example, cannot be understood except in terms of the American
reaction to the Cuban Revoltion and the attempt to avoid a "second Cuba."
During Kennedy's time, the U.S. tried to promote democracy and reform.
Eduardo Frei Sr.'s Christian Democratic regime in Chile became the model. But
with Lyndon Johnson, things changed, the fear of a "new Cuba" led to the
Dominican invasion in 1965 and a series of coup d'etats which were in part
triggered by the fact that some democratically elected governments, like the
ones in Argentina and Brazil, did not want to follow the U.S. line on Cuba.
In the 70s, after a short democratic reprieve, new military dictatorships
were established in some of these countries. Videla in Argentina, and
Pinochet in Chile committed the worst crimes ever seen in the history of the
region.The 'missing', the 'desaparecidos', a terrible new form of government
military terror, not invented by Communism, but by 'Christian soldiers'. Even
worse, the children of many of the 'missing', some of them born in captivity,
were adopted by military families or sold to other families. The U.S. did not
apply any embargo against any of these regimes like the one applied to Cuba,
only secondary and very lenient economic sanctions. One part of the reason
for these regimes to be suplanted by democracies was the debt crisis of the
80's. The lost decade and the endebtment of Latin America made it inadvisable
for the military to remain in power, so little by little they promoted
partial democracies. But many of these democracies are not true democracies,
and Dr. Mayer knows it. In the meantime, Latin America and the Caribbean
remains the world champion in social and economic inequality. Dr. Mayer can
consult the last reports of the Interamerican Development Bank or of the
United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Neoliberalism, that silent revolution, has indeed brought economic growth for
the region, following the 'Washington Consensus' of the World Bank, but at
the cost of an increase in poverty, malnutrition, child labor, and, most of
all wide inequality. For all its economic successes, ask any average Chilean
what kind of health service does he expect, and you will get an interesting
answer.

I have not claimed that Cuba did not have very high economic statistics
before 1959. But I would say that those statistics hid the extreme
inequalities of Cuban everyday life. And, of course, although good in
economic terms, they were very unsatisfactory in terms of social justice
(illiteracy, infant mortality and life expectancy). What I have said all
along is that the Cuban political system was in crisis and that one of the
reason for its crisis was U.S. hegemony over it.

Dr. Mayer's final recommendations are taken as an advice. We welcome any and
all advice when we feel it is not addressed to destroying the things we
consider basic: national independence, social justice and our way of doing
things. So, in that note I would like to end this posting modestly
disagreeing with Dr. Mayer.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 23 July 1998

From: Gregory Alegi <gra...@tin.it>

The thread on Cuba and the United States continues to be very interesting and
has developed various sub-threads regarding
the moment and cause of Cuba's alliance with the USSR (which Tom Nichols seems
to consider inevitable, whereas Carlos
Alzugaray Treto suggests was in part dictated by US policies) and Castro's
willingness or desire to unleash nuclear war
(opinions differ around the interpretations of Fidel's "IF"), but also on the
nature of Communism, its achievements in the island,
the cost thereof and the existence of an alternative line of development. I
would like to comment on some of these points
before the thread runs out.

1. I was moved by Professor Alzugaray's account of medical assistance
available for the birth of the premature children of both the elite, to which
he belongs, and a black construction worker. Certainly the level of medical
care achieved by the regime represents one of its major successes, and I see
no point is discussing whether statistics are doctored by a few points. The
basic fact of the success remains. I would therefore propose that we (a)
concede the point; (b) in return, Alzugaray will not bring it up again; (c)
Alzugaray take note that similar situations exist in most Western/capitalist
countries (albeit not the US) which have a national health system. This is
certainly the case of Italy, the UK, the Scandinavian countries and Holland.
Therefore, while successful, free universal medical care is not unique to
Cuba or Socialist regimes, nor does it seem to require totalitarianism.

2. I thank Prof. Alzugaray for the additional details on corruption in the
Cuban armed forces. I fear that knowing whether they are isolated occurrences
or symptoms of a widespread situation remains an open question - like the
vexed questions of whether the sins of the Pope affect the holiness of the
Church.

3. According to the Italian press, which is very pro-Castro, as well as
personal accounts of Italian tourists to Cuba (which I believe is now the
single favourite Caribbean destination of Italian tourists), it would seem
that prostitution has returned en masse to the tourist areas. Since Alzugaray
repeatedly cited prostitution as a major flaw or fault of the Batista regime,
I should imagine that he is troubled by this new (?) development, which could
be seen by some as indicating the Socialist failure to improve ethical/moral
above those of a corrupt paleo-capitalist regime.

4. For the benefit of those who are as unfamiliar with Italian as I am with
Russian or Vietnamese, "Il libro nero del comunismo" means "The Black Book of
Communism". This is not a propagandistic tome as Alzugaray seems to believe,
but a serious research effort by a number of French academics (hence the
original title, Le Livre Noir du Communisme) to discover whether there is a
pattern of totalitarianism/brutality in the historical applications of
Communism (not in Marxist theory) by charting the events in Communist
countries. In doing so, they compiled a list of atrocities which makes Hitler
and Mussolini look like altar boys. The Russian section is largely based on
recent archival finds and confirms that the continuity between Lenin and
Stalin is much greater than was previously believed. The chapters on other
countries, including Cuba, are necessarily shorter and less based on archival
research. Another book critical of Communism is Francois Furet's "The Past of
an Illusion" - and do note that Furet used to be on the Left. Just like
Giuliano Ferrara, the Moscow-educated son of a prominent Communist family,
who has said that in the political life of a man there are two things to be
proud of: to have been a Communist and to no longer be one. I would however
point out to Prof. Alzugaray that he has said not a word about the two laws
cited in the Black Book. (By the way - the quotes in my 7/20 post were from
the Black Book, not from the text of the laws, which I would be quite willing
to read in Spanish if Alzugaray cares to supply them).

5. But all this detail merely gives a quantitative dimension to a qualitative
judgement which had been reached much earlier by direct witnesses such as
Orwell or Mieli. The latter, you might recall, was the top aide of Togliatti
who in the early 1960s had already come to the conclusion that there would

have been Stalinism even without Stalin.

6. The watered-down definition of Marxism, or of its objectives, given by
Alzugaray a few postings ago is so generic as to remind me of virtually every
other philosophical or political positions. Certainly Tom Nichols is correct
in pointing out that originally class struggle had something to do with
Marxism? (on the other hand, recently Walter Veltroni, the Italian Deputy
Prime Minister and a member of the PDS, formerly the Italian Communist Party,
claimed that he saw no problem in calling himself an anti-Communist ...)

7. I am uncertain as to what Prof. Alzugaray meant to imply when he referred
to me by saying "all we know about him is that he writes from Italy". As far
as I know, writing from Italy is not yet a crime in either the US or Cuba.
But to satisfy his curiosity, I am quite glad to say that I was born in the
USA from an American father and an Italian mother, grew up in Italy and
attended Italian public schools (where I was threatened by the local
right-wing thugs for being ... well yes, on the left!) before going to
college in the US. For a long time I had Che Guevara posters and even voted
for the Communist Party, passing on to the Socialists, then the Republicans
(in both Italy and the USA). My academic interests center around Italian
contemporary history and military history, on which I have written
extensively. I teach military history at the Italian Air Force Academy.
Having said this, I still don't understand how it will affect the way my
postings are read.

8. If this thread is to peter out, let it end with another Polish joke.

Q. What is Marxism?

A. Looking for a bed in a dark room.

Q. What is Marxism-Leninism?

A. Looking for a bed which isn't there in a dark room.

Q. What is Marxism-Leninism-real Socialism?

A. Looking for a bed which isn't there in a dark room and shouting "I found
it!"

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 25 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

James Hershberg's posting's last sentence is addressed to me:

>If our Cuban scholar's contention is correct (that Cuba acted independently in
foreign affairs, not >as a Kremlin puppet or
stooge), this is especially unfortunate and self-defeating.

Well, I basically agree, although I would not use so strong terms. Let me tell
him that some progress has been made lately. I
was personally involved in the release of some documents on Cuban-Canadian
relations for Professors John Kirk (Dalhousie)
and Peter McKenna (Saint Mary's) of Halifax Nova Scotia, for their book
_Canada-Cuba relations: The Other Good
Neighbor Policy_, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997). The recent
biographers of Che Guevara, Jon Anderson,
Jorge Castaneda, Paco Ignacio Taibo and others have obtained documents from
Cuban archives. Piero Gleijeses, who is
working on Cuba's involvement in Africa has also been able to examine Cuban
archives.

One must never forget we are a country facing a formidable enemy and that, in
itself, promotes a siege mentality.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 25 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

In response to Gregory Alegi's last posting in this thread, let me say this:

1. I agree that we should agree on point number one. I know and in fact admire
European health care systems. Having lived in
Europe's capital (Brussels) I agree that free health care is not a trait only
found in socialist countries like mine but also in
capitalist countries with a strong welfare state. My only proviso is that I do
not accept his implication that Cuba is a totalitarian
state. I also suggest he does not use it again in referring to Cuba.

2. Let me disagree on point 2. I am ready to admit that there have been and
that there probably still are problems of corruption in Cuba's armed forces.
My contention is that they are no inherent to our Armed Forces and that they
did not behave as a conquering army in their internationalist missions and
that this was a problem that was addressed head-on by the armed forces
leadership, which did not shrink from punishing its most decorated general
once the crime was discovered. It is not the only way to keep an Army's nose
clean, but it certainly helps. I must insist on this because that was not the
story before the Revolution, and that is not the story in some Armed Forces
in Latin America and the Caribbean. Cuba's armed forces are a proud part of
the nation, they have rendered important services to their people and I
simply will reject anything that blemishes that record. U.S. official
documents by and large recognize this and the U.S. Armed Forces feel a
healthy respect for their Cuban counterparts, something that has kept us out
of war.

3. I have talked about the mafia controlling the casinos, the gambling, and
the hotels in my postings, but I do not remember specifically mentioning
prostitution. Dr. Alegi brings it up and it is fair that he does, because it
is one of the symptoms of the crisis that hurts us more. The Revolution
effectively eliminated prostitution in the 60s. It put a lot of effort in
that program. When we now see young girls returning to do something we
thought was eliminated, it creates a great laceration. Prostitution has
social and family origins, but I believe that the causes are more social than
anything else. But, what can we do except keep trying to solve our economic
problems in order to start again 're-educating' these young girls. By the
way, Dr. Alegi is right, more and more Italians are coming to Cuba and the
wrong impression has been created here and in Italy that they only come for
sex. This only shows that prostitution is a two-way street, like in any other
'free market' there are those who buy and those who sell. For me if the
existence of prostitution is not a good sign in any society, neither is it
for a nation to be seen as love-crazy individuals that are only interested in
one kind of tourism. For the time being we have been able to control the type
of prostitution exercised. What I mean is that we are controlling and
repressing specificaly proxenetism and other practices which exploit these
young girls.

4. It is very difficult for me to judge a book I have not read, but, frankly,
if tomorrow somebody came up to me with a book entitled _The Black Book of
Capitalism_ I would be extremely skeptical about its scientific value. Maybe
I am prejudiced, but that's the way I think. I will try to get the laws to
Dr. Alegi but I can't promise anything because, as I said, time is pressing
me. Our laws might seem harsh, but it must be remembered that we are in a
cold war with the largest superpower on earth since the 60s.

5. Dr. Alegi keeps bringing up the testimony of former Communists as if they
were especially qualified observers, but that can
hardly be called independent evidence. If they abandoned the left or the
Communist Party there must have been a reason and
their vision must be clouded by that fact. I do no question them or their
motives but it does not seem to me that what they
would say is of particular importance.

6. I believe I have responded to Dr. Alegi's sixth point in a previous point
answering Tom Nichols.

7. Yes, Dr. Alegi, I confess I was curious about you. You can check my
credentials in a previous posting I wrote answering
Alexander Mayer. I might add that I prefer Gramsci's Marxism to many other
expressions of our theory.

8. Dr. Alegi ends with Che's final goodbye, which proves he was a Guevarist
at some point in his life. I don't know to whose victory he is referring. I
still have a great admiration for Che. He was a true Communist, ready to make
the greatest sacrifice for what he believed in. The best thing about him was
the coherence between his thinking and his behavior. That is an admirable
trait no matter what one thinks about the man's philosphy or politics. I have
tried, modestly, to follow him on that, although I recognize that I have not
reached that level of perfection.

gdpop...@my-dejanews.com

unread,

Oct 10, 1998, 3:00:00 AM10/10/98

Date: 25 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 25 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

Tim Naftali has raised a very interesting point in his contribution to this
thread. As might have been expected, Tom Nichols has enthusiastically
supported Naftali's contribution. As might also be expected, I disagree on
certain key points.

This is the first part of my answer.

[Moderator's Note: We will run part II of Dr. Alzugaray's post tomorrow.]

Let me start by clearing up some secondary but nevertheless significant

aspects of Naftali's arguments. He writes:

>As Soviet-era documents make clear both Raul Castro and Che Guevara were
already members >of the PSP at the time
that Fidel Castro achieved power and were leaders of this microfaction.

I don't know what the Soviet era documents say but that's simply not true.
Raul Castro was close to the Communist Youth organization at the University
and participated at the International Youth Festival in Vienna (sometime in
the fifties). This makes him maybe a 'fellow-traveller' but there is no proof
that he was a PSP member. I don't know if Dr. Naftali is aware that, as any
Cuban specialist will tell him, the Party called the 1956 attack on the
Moncada garrison in Santiago de Cuba, the first salvo of the Cuban Revolution
led by Fidel Castro, a 'putschist adventure'. Raul Castro was one of its main
participants. As a specialist in Soviet and Communist affairs, Dr. Naftali
must know that it's rather doubtful that, if he had been a member of the PSP,
he would have been authorized to participate; but, if he was and did it
without authorization, most surely he would have been expelled from the Party
right then and there. That does not deny in any way his radicalism or his
antimperialism. Both of them are factual. Then again, most Cuban young people
were quite radical and antimperialist in the 50s.

Che Guevara could not have been a member of the PSP. He never had contact with
the PSP before entering Cuba as a
member of the 26th of July expedition led by Fidel in 1956. Let me remind Dr.
Naftali that Che joined Fidel's revolutionary
expedition in Mexico and therefore became a member of the July 26th Movement
leadership. He can check Castaneda's or
Anderson's biographies, which are well-documented and certainly not 'Cuban
Communist propaganda' and he will confirm
that Che was never a party member, in Cuba or elsewhere. He was a radical
socialist, a Marxist and antimperialist, yes.

At this point it is convenient to note that the PSP did not support armed
revolutionary struggle in the Sierra as a means of fighting Batista until
sometime in early 1958. The Party preferred what then was defined as 'mass
struggle', that is, working class actions in urban centers and peasants
uprising in sugar mills, where the working class was strong. Raul and Che
came in the Granma expedition in december 1956 and became members of the July
26th Movement in April 1958, precluding then from being PSP members.

Second clarification. Dr. Naftali claims that:

>In "One Hell of a Gamble" Aleksandr Fursenko and I quoted from Politburo
records indicating >that the communist
"microfaction" of the July 26th movement requested help from Moscow in >April
1959

There was never a communist "microfaction" in the July 26th Movement. There
were radicals and moderates, the left or the right, but in Cuban political
parlance, the word microfaction is associated with the pro-Soviet, old PSP
cadres, who, headed by Anibal Escalante and other former members of the PSP
CC, controled the organizational structure of the newly formed Partido Unido
de la Revolucion Socialista in 1962 and introduced sectarian pro-PSP policies
and cadres at key institutions. This group was denounced by Fidel in March
1962 and was not labelled as a 'microfaction' until March 1968, at a report
presented to the Central Committee by Raul Castro himself, who accused them
of conspiring with the Soviet KGB resident to unseat Fidel and the rest of
the leadership. They were expelled from the CC and the Party. These people
were Stalinist diehards who thought Fidel, Che, Raul and their close
associates were 'petit bourgeois revolutionaries' and not sufficiently
proletarian. By the way, one of today's best known dissidents, Elizardo
Sanchez Santa Cruz, was closely associated with this Stalinist group.

Third clarification. Dr. Naftali further asserts:

>when Raul Castro sent a representative, Lazaro Pena, to the Kremlin to seek the

assistance of >old Spanish republicans who had graduated from Soviet military
academies. Raul wanted these >men to come to Cuba secretly to "help the Cuban
army... on general matters and for the >organization of intelligence work."
This was DURING Fidel's fabled first visit to the US as >Cuban leader.

Let us start with Lazaro Pena. He was not a July 26th Movement member or an
Army officer. He was a very respected and experienced communist labor leader,
who had been Secretary General of the CTC (Central of Cuban Workers). Pena
was a member of the 1940 constitutional assembly and a congressman in the
early 40s. After the II World War, in the midst of an anti-Communist campaign
carried out at the instigation of U.S. officials, he was unlawfully kicked
out of his post as labor leader by thugs, when Carlos Prio, then Labour
Minister in the Grau government, intervened the trade unions.

This trip that Dr. Naftali mentions was probably part of Pena's regular
contacts with Soviet trade unions as labor leader. The message he carried
from Raul Castro. Was it official? Or was it merely a sounding previous to
future official demands? Was it the Party's own idea after talking with Raul?
Was it done at the express orders of Raul? Did Fidel know about it and
approve it? What happened afterwards? Did the Soviets react and send
inmediately their personnel? I think the answers to these questions are
important if we are going to decide what came first. That fact by itself
hardly means that in April 1959 Cuba was searching for an anti-American
alliance with the Soviets with the sole purpose of undermining American
security. I have not read Fursenko's and Naftali's book, a consequence of the
difficulties of the U.S. blockade, but I would like to know when and how the
Soviets reacted to this request.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 26 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

This is the second part of my reply to Dr. Timothy Naftali and Dr. Tom
Nichols. I must rectify a mistake I made in the posting containing the first
part of my response to Tim Naftali. The assault on the Moncada Barracks was
in 1953 and not in 1956. Raul Castro had just returned from the Youth
Festival in Vienna.

Tim Naftali ends his posting with the following paragraph:

>Unfortunately Cuban papers on the important 1959-60 period are unavailable. But

the Soviet >record makes clear that just as there were influential Americans
who never intended to get along >with an independently-minded Cuban leader,
there were powerful Cubans who never had any >desire to work with a
Capitalist America. It doesn't really matter who wrote which document first.

That the Cuban Revolution was the result of different political forces is
nothing new. It is also an accepted fact that at the beginning there were
probably two or more factions vying for influence inside the July 26th
Movement, the most important revolutionary organization. There was an
extremely radical, pro-Communist and anti-imperialist tendency led by Che and
Raul. Nobody doubts that either. But there was also a moderate wing, led by
some of the people who headed the resistance movement in the cities. There
was a Sierra-Llano (Mountain-Plain) contradiction, with the Sierra people
being in general more radical, socialist-oriented and anti-imperialist, and
the Llano people less radical, less socialist-oriented, but probably as
anti-imperialist as the Sierra people.

But there was a broad consensus that things had to change in Cuba and three
important demands common to all groups -with the exception of the oligarchy
and Batista's friends- would sooner or later put the Revolution on a
collision course with U.S. interests: Agrarian Reform, nationalization of
public utilities and other natural resources like mining, etc., and
elimination of Cuban economic dependence on the U.S. market.

For example, my father, who was a typical bourgeois national reformist (he
had rice lands and a rice mill in central Cuba), had written a booklet in
1939 entitled _Anti-imperialism: The Only Solution to the Cuban Problem_, in
which he argued that we had to use Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy in order
to liberate ourselves of the overwhelming influence that he thought Wall
Street had over Cuban economics and politics. Many moderate and patriotic
Cubans thought that way.

Radicals argued that the U.S. would never permit even the minimal program of
reform and that the Revolution had to face that
possibility head-on, searching for allies wherever they could be found,
including the Communists inside the country and the
Soviet Union outside. Moderates preferred a different course, hoping that they
would be able to carry on the reforms without
an open break with the U.S. (my father's theory: the enemy was the American
oligarchy not necessarily the American
government). But, let me repeat, moderates were as determined as radicals in
carrying out certain reforms and in taking Cuba
out of the neocolonial situation it lived under U.S. hegemony.

Therefore, in the complicated and circumvoluted politics between Cuba, the
U.S. and the Soviet Union, it is important what the documentary record shows.
My point is that the radicals were proved right and the moderates wrong and
this decided the direction that the Revolution took from there on.

There were Americans in government and outside of the government who, had
they had their way, would have followed a different policy towards Cuba. One
of them was Philip Bonsal, the last Ambassador in Havana. But even people
like Bonsal were completely wrong in their perception of the relationship.
Let me quote from his memoirs, in which he is critical of the policy followed
by Washington, a policy from which he was excluded, and yet he had the
following view:

"In pre-Castro Cuba, the pervasive American presence in geopolitical terms
was a constant reminder of the imperfect nature of Cuban sovereignty. Valued
by some as a guarantee of stability and of the maintenance of what was on the
whole a satisfactory way of life, it was rejected by others as an intolerable
infringement on the independence and dignity of the Cuban people. I suspect
that the majority of thinking Cubans regarded it as a fact of life against
which it was useless to struggle. It did, after all, bring Cuba a number of
apparently irreplaceable economic advantages." (PHILIP W. BONSAL, CUBA,
CASTRO, AND THE UNITED STATES, PITTSBURGH: UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS,
1971, Introduction).

As I have written elsewhere, 'Bonsal was wrong on two counts: American
hegemony did not bring advantages for the Cuban people as a whole except for
a small minority of oligarchs; & the majority of 'thinking' Cubans, not to
speak of the majority of 'non-thinking', did not consider it a permanently
fatal condition to which we had to submit.'

But let us deal head-on with the issue which Dr. Nichols is only too eager to

blame Cuba and Fidel for. In his posting he says:

>Cuba, after 1961, was a Soviet ally. (I have used the word "client," but I will
accept Alzugaray's >stronger term here.) In
any case, there's a price to be paid for that. The Cuban government >should
accept the consequences of its own decisions a
bit more stoically, in my opinion.

Let us suppose that Fidel was inspired by how Jose Marti, Cuba's best known
XIX century patriot and leader of the final war of independence in 1895, went
about organizing the uprising. In an unfinished letter he was writing to his
Mexican friend Manuel Mercado on 19 May 1898 just before being killed in a
skirmish with Spanish troops, Marti proclaimed that everything he had been
doing was with only one end in mind: to stop, with Cuba's independence, the
United States from falling all over Latin America and imposing its
domination. He added that he had to do it in silence, because there are
things which, to be attained, must be done in utmost secrecy.

In line with that maybe Fidel was really conspiring all along in secret with
the Soviet Union and the Cuban Communists in order to overthrow the
capitalist oligarchy and instituting a socialist state 90 miles from the
U.S.A. as Dr. Nichols and Dr. Naftali suggest. Let me ask, what is so wrong
with that? We had no quarrel with the Soviet Union, but many quarrels with
the United States. Cuban Communists had a long history of participation in
Cuban political life. They had made mistakes (like supporting Batista en
1940-44), but they had also being outstanding defenders of the nation against
American imperialism. Many of its leaders were outstanding Cubans, like Julio
Antonio Mella (a young student whose bust was and is at the University of
Havana, by the way also a great player of American football), Ruben Martinez
Villena (outstanding poet and politician who led the party in the early
thirties), Juan Marinello (essayist, writer, poet, President of the Party in
the 50s), Blas Roca (member of the 1940 constitutional assembly), Lazaro
Pena, Jesus Menendez (sugar labor leader who struggled and obtained the
'sugar differential' an important labor conquest for the sugar workers,
murdered by one of the Army's most cruel captains), Aracelio Iglesias (labor
leader from the docks of La Habana), Nicolas Guillen (considered by many
Cuba's most outstanding poet of the XX century).

I know what Dr. Nichols will say: You defied American power, you must pay.
Well, I can turn around the argument: the U.S. made many mistakes in Cuba and
supported the most brutal dictatorships. Why shouldn't it pay for its
mistakes? I know, because it is a mighty superpowers and mighty superpowers
are never wrong and if they are wrong, then the rest must pay.

In any case, I do not think that Dr. Naftali or Dr. Nichols have proved their
point. If Cuba was responsible for putting U.S. security at risk in 1962, it
was precisely because the U.S. did not admit its mistakes in Cuba and tried
to solve the problem by destroying the Cuban government more than merely
threatening Cuba's national security. I have not quoted an obscure envoy
supposedly sent by Raul Castro according to Soviet Politburo documents -by
the way suddenly more sacred that the Bible. I have quoted a definite
description of relations between Cuba and the United States made by two high
level officials of the Eisenhower Administration speaking at the most
important policy making body in American foreign and security policy. In it,
these officials admit quite clearly, without any doubt whatsoever, that
between April and June 1959 the U.S. had decided it could not live with Fidel
and began plans to replace him and that the alleged motives for that decision
did not have anything to do with a Soviet-Cuban alliance. I think this is
important.

Dr. Nichols comes again to his original position. If any country defies the
U.S., the most 'moral' and 'righteous' state in the world, it should pay for
the consequences. Even more, it has no right to defend itself, it must suffer
stoically (his own word) whatever the U.S. decides to do. This, I must say
again, although I regret saying it, is pure arrogance, the arrogance of power
that Senator Fulbright talked about in the 60s and that has cost the U.S.
dearly.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 26 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

I am reacting to Curt Caldwell's posting about U.S. knowledge of the U.S. and
Cuba and propaganda. I do not know if the
moderator will keep it in this thread or put it in the United States and Cuba
thread. I will leave that up to him.

In the 80s U.S. official propaganda made got a lot of mileage out of the
Valladares case. His story was central to the Reagan's Administration efforts
to get Cuba condemned at the Human Rights Commission. According to the U.S.
official version, uncritically reproduced by the American media, Valladares
was a dissident poet jailed by the regime for his ideas and condemned to a 20
year prison term. In that story Valladares had been crippled by torture
inflicted on him by the Cuban police and was unable to walk. The campaign was
so huge that a wheel-chair was sent by some NGO, I don't remember which. Then
Valladares wrote some poems entitled 'From my Wheel Chair', which were duly
published in the U.S. When Valladares was finally released, he wrote a book
widely propagated by U.S. media 'Against All Hope'. President Reagan said he
had read the book and presented Valladares with some decoration (might it be
the medal of liberty?) at the White House. By the way, Valladares did not
show any problem in walking at the ceremony and, of course, he did not need a
wheelchair anymore. Valladares was given U.S. citizenship and named
Ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. This latter
decision played into Cuban hands: Valladares was such a lousy diplomat that
most Latin American and Western delegations loathed when he participated in
the Commission's sessions, usually in the Cuban case.

What was the real story, as can be verified from Cuban files and films of
Valladares' life in prison? First, Valladares had been a policeman during
Batista's dictatorship, granted a minor case, but still a significant fact.
He was demobilized after the triumph of the Revolution and nothing happened
to him since he had not been involved in direct cases of torture or murder.
Second, he started opposing the Revolution by violent means and got involved
with a terrorist group that was carrying out bombings in public places
(theaters, parks, etc.) He received a twenty year prison sentence. Third, he
was never a poet nor a writer (some people claim that his literary work was
probably ghost-written outside Cuba), no writing attributed to him has been
found except what was mentioned above. Fourth, he was never mistreated and he
was never an invalid. However, as a good-will gesture to several
international NGOs who requested it, he was given the wheel-chair and treated
as an invalid in prison even though Cuban doctors had certified he had
absolutely no problem. Films shown on Cuban and U.S. TV show him running in
the track field of the prison and exercising in his cell at the time he was
supposed to be incapacitated. But the interesting thing was when he was
released at the request of Francois Mitterrand, who gave him the possibility
of going to France (the U.S. had already announced it would give Valladares
political asylum). Cuban authorities took him to the airport in his
wheel-chair not contradicting his play-acting but made it plain that if he
wanted to leave the country he would have to cross the tarmac and climb the
stairs to the airplane on his own. Valladares without hesitation almost ran
into the aircraft. (French authorities, among them Regis Debrary, were so
embarrassed that they never wanted to hear about Valladares again).

After serving some time as U.S. Ambassador, Valladares became active in
Cuban-American politics until he ran afoul of Jorge Mas Canosa and his
Cuban-American National Foundation. I do not know what he is doing nowadays,
but he certainly is not writing poems or any other thing.

gdpop...@my-dejanews.com

unread,

Oct 10, 1998, 3:00:00 AM10/10/98

Date: 26 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 26 July 1998

From: Tom Nichols <nich...@concentric.net>

At the end of his reply to Tim Naftali, Carlos Azugaray writes:

>Dr. Nichols comes again to his original position. If any country defies the

U.S., the most 'moral' >and 'righteous' state in the world, it should pay for
the consequences. Even more, it has no right >to defend itself, it must
suffer stoically (his own word) whatever the U.S. decides to do. This, I
>must say again, although I regret saying it, is pure arrogance, the
arrogance of power that >Senator Fulbright talked about in the 60s and that
has cost the U.S. dearly.

I'm not sure how "dearly" this has cost us (I would argue that the
now-extinct Soviets have paid the greatest price of all for the "arrogance of
power"), but in any case, since I've been out of this thread for a bit, I
think it's important to point out: This isn't quite what I said.

This all began when I originally wrote that I believed the United States
should opt out of the ICC rather than risk delivering its officers into the
hands of various international malefactors, representatives of rogue or
otherwise odious states who could not plausibly claim to have the moral
standing to the judge the U.S. or its foreign policy. It is, I grant, an
unapologetic American exceptionalism, but it is obviously different than
calling for positive punishment for nations that "defy" America.

As for the issue of suffering stoically:

States and their leaders make choices. Actions have consequences, alliances
have meaning. Cuba chose to ally with America's worst enemy (and a plainly
evil state), the USSR.

Cuba cannot now have it both ways: it cannot ally with the Soviet Union and
then complain about being shut out of U.S. markets. Castro made his choice,
and he and the Cuban Party should accept the consequences of that choice
without complaint. I hardly think that the United States should somehow
accept responsibility for the economic well-being of the allies of our
enemies, and for the Cubans to complain about hostile U.S. economic policy
after alliance with the Soviets strikes me not only as unseemly but downright
illogical. Hence, my comment about stoicism: the Cuban regime should simply
have the courage of its convictions and live according to the principles it
espouses and the choices it has made.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 26 July 1998

From: Bob Buzzanco <buzz...@Jetson.UH.EDU>

While there is really nothing substantive to add to Carlos Alzugaray's
exhaustive and intelligent postings about U.S. aggression
in Cuba, I would like to point out a couple of items to Tom Nichols, Tim
Naftali, and the rest of the Cold War Brigade that
continues to carry out its intellectual Bay of Pigs into the 1990s. While U.S.
behavior in Cuba over the past century has been
well-documented, there are many Americans--predisposed by ideology and
stubbornness--who refuse to acknowledge an
U.S. wrongdoings.

Recently the New York Times ran a two-part article on Luis Posada Carriles.
Posada was trained by the CIA to participate in the ill-fated, and illegal,
Bay of Pigs invasion. After that he enlisted in the Army and received
training at Fort Benning, along with fellow Cuban terrorist Jorge Mas Canosa.
After a year, he quit the army and became a CIA operative, and then, with CIA
connections, the head of the Venezuelan Security Police. In 1976, Posada and
other American-supported Cuban terrorists were responsible for the bombing of
a Cubana Airlines flight, in which 78 were killed [now what is the U.S.
policy toward such terrorism?] After bribing a warden to get out of prison,
Posada next appeared working with Oliver North and his contra resupply
network out of El Salvador. Not content with the indirect killing of
Nicaraguans, Posada has taken credit for a series of 1997 bombings in Havana
hotels in which foreign tourists have been killed. Posada claims to have
continued working up through the bombings with both the Miami-based Cuban
American National Foundation and with the FBI.

Where is the outrage about Luis Posada Carriles? How can the U.S. government
sponsor such a vicious, self-admitted terrorist? And how can the
"freedom-loving" people posting their diatribes about Cuba on H-DIPLO remain
so silent about this?

A second point: earlier someone berated Mr. Alzugaray and the Cuban
government for shooting down the so-called humanitarian flight of Hermanos de
Basultos [Brothers to the Rescue]. Consider this scenario: a group of Libyans
[or Iraqis, or Koreans, or any other--pick one] vows to oust the current
American government and carries on a long-term economic and political
campaign against the U.S. It begins to repeatedly violate American airspace
and drops leaflets over U.S. cities calling for a national uprising. How long
would those planes remain in the air????

I am glad that Mr. Alzugaray has added a bit of balance, and may I say
sanity, to this thread. But I hope he is not optimistic that his explanations
will be accepted by many scholars on this list. Alas, the Cold War is alive
and well on H-DIPLO.

Bob Buzzanco, University of Houston

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 27 July 1998

From: James Hershberg <jhe...@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>

I just have a short comment to make about Bob Buzzanco's post about "Tom
Nichols, Tim Naftali, and the rest of the Cold War brigade that continues to
carry out their intellectual Bay of Pigs into the 1990s," complaining about
their failure (and H-DIPLO's) to make a stink about Luis Posada Cariles. I
wholly agree about Posada, and I (along with Malcolm Byrne, Tom Blanton, and
Peter Kornbluh at the National Security Archive) was writing about him 10
years ago in outrage at the failure of the US media and the pusillanimous
Iran-contra Congressional Committee to investigate US ties to Posada (aka
Ramon Medina) which were already evident from the materials obtained during
the hearings. It was probably the most single outrageous item that came out
during the investigation, with the possible exception of North & Co.'s
dealings with Noriega, yet both were mostly ignored by the mainstream media.
(The NYT briefly featured the latter in November 1987 in an article by
Stephen Engelberg the day after the Congressional Report was issued, but it
took eleven years to get around to Posada.) However, I don't think it helps
Buzzanco's point to smear people with a broad brush. I don't know Tom
Nichols, but I know Tim Naftali, and he is a serious scholar (read his book)
and hardly someone who "refuse[s] to acknowledge an[y] U.S. wrongdoings," let
alone the especially idiotic ones undertaken in connection with the Bay of
Pigs, Operation Mongoose, assassination plots against Castro et al., and the
Iran-contra affair. To criticize Cuban actions (especially keeping archives
closed) does not, or should not, imply blanket approval of U.S. actions, nor
does it obligate those who do so to express outrage about Posada (just as I
can blast US actions in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, etc. during the Cold War
without saying every time, "Boy, those commies were really nasty, but...").

Jim Hershberg, History Dept., George Washington University Date: 27 July 1998

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 27 July 1998

From: Reid Rozen <r-r...@students.uiuc.edu>

Bob Buzzanco complains about the "Cold War Brigade that continues to carry
out its intellectual Bay of Pigs into the 1990s" -- whatever that means --
and points to a recent two-part series in the New York Times exposing the
nefarious activities of Luis Posada Carriles, who apparently has or had some
ties to the CIA, Oliver North, and other unsavory types. Mr.

Buzzanco then asks: "Where is the outrage about Luis Posada Carriles?"

Well, Mr. Buzzanco, it seems that it is in the pages of the New York Times.

Really, it's quite amazing that someone in America would cite an American
newspaper article and then complain about the
lack of American "outrage." I suppose that we as a nation must continue to
suffer from an incapacity to recognize irony.
Presumably, then, it is fruitless to point out that crimes committed at the
behest of the Cuban government would probably not
receive similar coverage in a Havana newspaper.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 27 July 1998

From: Carlos Alzugaray <calzu...@minrex.gov.cu>

In his last posting, when replying to my comment about the costs of U.S.
arrogance as defined by Senator Fulbright in the 60s,
Tom Nichols makes quite a surprising statement:

>I'm not sure how "dearly" this has cost us

Well, I must point out to Dr. Nichols only one example, the 56,146 American
casualties suffered during the Vietnam War, an
unnecessary war resulting from the U.S. Government's arrogant mistake of
thinking that they could suppress the Vietnamese
people's longing for independence and national unity. Maybe Dr. Nichols just
considers them necessary costs of the battle
against the 'evil empire' of communism.

If I did or did not represent well the essence of Dr. Nichols' assertions
about why Cuba had to suffer 'stoically' for defying the U.S., this is
something that other list members can judge. I believe that is the message I
got from him along the whole thread, not just from his first statements about
the ICC.

But let me accept Dr. Nichols arguments that actions have consequences and
apply it to the October 1962 crisis over Soviet missiles in Cuba. These
missiles would never have been installed if the U.S. government had not
persisted in its all out effort to destroy the Cuban government and denied
all the time the possibility of negotiating the differences with Cuba. I
think the documentary record is quite clear on that. I have pointed out
Operation Mongoose. Dr. Nichols has not said a word about that. But let me
point to two more examples:

In August 1961, a few months after the Bay of Pigs disaster, Richard Goodwin,
Kennedy's adviser on Latin America, travelled to Punta del Este, Uruguay, as
member of a U.S. delegation to a conference on the Alliance for Progress.
Cuba was represented by Che Guevara. According to Goodwin's memoir
_Remembering America_ (Boston: Little Brown, 1988, pp. 190-208), Che insisted
in meeting him in private, at which point he proposed an agreement to
normalize relations by which he specifically offered as a Cuban concessions
not to establish a military alliance with the Soviet Union and restrain
Cuba's support of revolutionary movements in exchange for U.S. acceptance of
the irreversibility of the Cuban Revolution. There were other aspects: Che
promised to negotiate indemnization for nationalized American properties and
eventual multiparty elections after a period of institutionalization.

I cannot vouch that Cuban archives would confirm the existence of such a
proposal, but what is evident from Goodwin's
account is that he considered it serious enough and told President Kennedy so.
The interesting thing is that when he met the
President at the White House, Kennedy accepted the gift Goodwin had received
from Che, a box of premier quality Cuban
cigars and merely told him to write down a memo for the members of the NSC.
Obviously, President Kennedy was not
interested in any kind of negotiation with Cuba at the time because, as the
record shows, there was no follow up on this offer.

Second example. In September 1962, the Cuban Cabinet published a document
proposing negotiations with the United
States and specifically suggested that these negotiations should include
indemnization of U.S. property nationalized by the
Revolution. Then President Dorticos travelled to the U.N. (New York)
specifically to present this view. The U.S. again
ignored that overture.

The fact of the matter is that the U.S. government was never interested in
negotiating seriously with Cuba on the outstanding issues between the two
governments until some months AFTER the Missile Crisis, when, shortly before
being murdered, President Kennedy ordered McGeorge Bundy to present a
proposal for normalization of relations with Cuba. At the time there were
also feelers being followed by William Attwood, U.S. Deputy United Nations
Representative, with Carlos Lechuga, Cuba's Representative in New York.

Therefore, I agree with Dr. Nichols, actions have consequences. The U.S.
hostility against the Cuban Revolution, which reached high levels of
intransigence in 1961 and 1962 gave Cuba no other choice but to strengthen
its defenses. U.S. actions against Cuba were the cause, Soviet missiles in
Cuba were the consequences. So, why complain?

Another surprising statement from Dr. Nichols requires also a comment. He
says:

>I hardly think that the United States should somehow accept responsibility for
the economic >well-being of the allies of our
enemies, and for the Cubans to complain about hostile U.S. >economic policy
after alliance with the Soviets strikes me not
only as unseemly but downright >illogical.

Dr. Nichols is wrong, I am not asking or requesting that the U.S. should be
responsible for Cuba's well-being, what the rest of the international
community (and me) is demanding of the U.S. is for it to stop unfairly
punishing and, in the process, hurting the well-being of the Cuban people
just because it wants Fidel Castro to pay for his supposed or real "sins."

A final point on another extraordinary statement by Dr. Nichols. He says:

>the Cuban regime should simply have the courage of its convictions and live
according to the >principles it espouses and the
choices it has made.

If there is something that the Cuban government can be hardly blamed for is
not having "the courage of its convictions" and living "according to the
principles it espouses and the choices it has made." If it were not doing
exactly that, and buckled under U.S. coercion, the blockade would have
disappeared long ago and Cuba would probably be receiving large amounts of
aid and recognition, as the U.S. government did, for example, with the
Ceaucescu regime in the 70s and 80s.

Re: Cuba and the United States

Date: 27 July 1998

From: Tom Nichols <nich...@concentric.net>

A quick response to both Bob Buzzanco and Carlos Alzugaray:

First, I want to echo Jim Hershberg's point that being critical of Cuba does
not mean blanket acceptance of U.S. policy. There is a very good reason that
I did not comment on the NYT story about Luis Posada Cariles: it's because I
haven't read the story yet.

It would not, however, surprise me to find out that the Americans were
involved with such a rotten character. I have said before, right here on
H-DIPLO, that I felt that during the Cold War the Americans did indeed do
many stupid, execrable things, and bringing these things to light and taking
responsibility for them is what keeps a democracy healthy. With that said, I
have no judgment to make about this Posada Cariles (just as in my earlier
post I didn't take a stand on the question about I.F. Stone) because I just
don't know enough about the particular case.

But let's stipulate: Good states can do bad things; bad states can
occasionally do a good turn. That in itself says nothing about the relative
merits of the two sets of conflicting states that struggled against each
other in the Cold War. I have never denied the reality that the Americans did
dumb, and sometimes awful, things during the Cold War, but I think it is
foolish to be baited into drawing an indefensible moral equivalence between
East and West because of that realization. It would be akin to saying that
because the Allies did terrible things during World War II--like strategic
bombing, or even individual atrocities--this somehow exonerates or excuses
the Nazis. But desperate, cruel or vengeful acts by both the Allies and the
Nazis in the field should not then lead to the conclusion that both sides
were equally right or wrong, or that life would have been pretty much the
same no matter who won. The same goes for the Cold War.

Carlos Alzugaray suggests that I underplayed the loss in blood and treasure
that America suffered during the Cold War because I questioned just how
"dearly" we paid for our struggles against Communism. (And yes, in passing, I
do think "evil empire" is a good description of the Soviet international
alliance system.) What I meant was that life in the United States was
relatively prosperous even as we fought the Cold War, even as the tragedy of
Vietnam was tearing the country apart domestically. The Soviets, by contrast,
saddled with the stupidest economic system since Sparta and the most hideous
ideology since Nazism, suffered mightily on a daily basis, and then paid the
ultimate price: extinction both as a state and an international movement.

Now, less than a decade after the Soviet collapse, the United States is the
single strongest and wealthiest nation on earth. That's a pretty quick
recovery from a conflict that lasted 45 years, cost thousands of American
deaths and billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars. This is why it struck me
that our "arrogance" had not had so "dear" a price as Sr. Alzugaray seems to
think.

Sr. Alzugaray's message also emphasizes the idea that the Americans drove the
Cubans into the arms of the Soviets and notes that I haven't commented on it.
I have in fact commented on it, by rejecting the idea. Others have posted on
the subject, and I won't retrace their steps here.

Finally, a word to Bob Buzzanco about shooting down unarmed aircraft. The Air
National Guard and other military entities in the U.S. have pretty strict
rules of engagement; I doubt seriously whether anyone would be allowed to
fire on unarmed aircraft (or would want to) unless a pilot were trying to
buzz the White House or posing some other serious risk to people on the
ground.

Maybe that's because of a significant difference between the U.S. and Cuba: we
don't think leaflets are dangerous.

The rest of the discussion can be seen on the website. Or you can ask me to
post the rest.

Regards,

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