Richard and All,
While I'm not Miriam, that never stopped me from running off my mouth.
The answer to your question regarding how many important people have
been forgotten, the answer is, Countless Billions.
Each living person today, represents an unbroken chain of successes,
dating back to the beginning of Time. To my great grandson Jace, my
dad, Clyde Fletcher Jarvis was a most important person. Jace will
remember his great-great grandpa, as well as his great grandpa(me) and
his grandma(my eldest daughter). We have a book that reminds Jace of
the people who made it possible for him to be here. On the Jarvis
side, it goes back to 1756, and the birth in Virginia(now West
Virginia) of John Jarvis. Earlier records are some uncertain. On the
Ludwig side there is a family tree going back to King Ludwig(called
"Mad King Ludwig"), in the 1400's. John Ludwig(born 1735) came to
America in 1752 and became a ship captain in the Revolutionary War.
All of these people are remembered, even if only by a small, but very
important number of folks...my family.
My rambling point is this, when we learn to honor and respect *All
humans who have walked upon this Planet Earth, when we do that, we
just might have the beginnings of a World Peace.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/28/16, Richard Driscoll <llocsirdsr@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Miriam:
I do not know if it is true but I am very confident that it is likely to
occur.
How many historical figures of great importance who have accomplished
many positive and possibly some of great importance have we forgotten?
Richard
On 11/28/2016 2:49 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
If that's true, it's unfortunate because he is an important historical
figure and he accomplished many positive things, many more than some of
our
ostensible allies.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Richard
Driscoll
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2016 3:24 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Reflections on the Death of Fidel Castro
All:
Yes in about five years when the name Fidel Castro is mentioned a large
portion of the audience will look undisturbed and say, Who?
Richard
On 11/28/2016 8:13 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
We will need to wait for the historical treatment of Castro, somewhereCuba.
out in the future...if we have a future. Presently we will be
subjected to the heavy "Hate Castro" folks to get their venom out of
their systems.
The very last people I would turn to for commentary on Castro's legacy
is "Little Cuba". Miami is the de facto capital of the old Cuba. I
have no proof, but my gut tells me that among those Cubans who grabbed
the People's money and fled to the protection of our Freedom Loving
country, were Mafia members, or at least Mafia business partners.
While I am always on the side of open government, by and for the
People, I can sympathize with a new government having to fight off the
death grip of the Mafia and its Ilk. I am not so old and fumbled
brained that I could forget what Cuba looked like to the average
working class Cuban. But in case folks are too young or too
indoctrinated to recall, just hold onto your britches, the Trumpsters
will take the USA down that same path. Think of the glitter and
glamor of the high rise hotels with the high priced nightclubs,
peopled by the glamorous wealthy Americans, decked out in their
finery. And back behind the facade will be the hovels of the working
serfs, living among the filth and pot holes of a crumbling, once proud
nation.
Civilization or Environment, it will be a race to the bottom. Which
one will lose first?
Carl Jarvis
On 11/28/16, joe harcz Comcast <joeharcz@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
And ironically for the law and order folks Battista was a total
puppet of the Mafia including Lanksy and their holdings and rackets in
Florida.Remember when Battista fled Cuba he didn't go empty handed. He fled
with $450 million in 1959 dollars.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl Jarvis" <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, November 27, 2016 2:19 PM
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Reflections on the Death of Fidel
Castro
IF Fidel Castro accomplished but one act, that of unseating Fulgencio
Batista, he would have been a "People's Hero".
Fulgencio Batista was the poster boy for all that was corrupt, cold
and greedy in Latin American Dictators.
But despite arousing the wrath of the wealthy Cubans and the "fun
loving" American rich, Fidel Castro went on to shape a government
that not only out lasted the corrupt governments in Latin America,
but raised the standard of living for the working class. Not
withstanding the mighty efforts by the American Empire to make Castro
into a Demon and a ruthless killer. I find it interesting that the
American Empire, while espousing democracy and freedom, took in the
suffering rich Cubans who grabbed their personal wealth and fled to
that the man was alive.And what really riles me, is the fact that America's working class
allowed these leeches to live off our hard earned working class
dollars, even as they plotted to bring Castro down and return to
their rightful place at the top of the heap.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/27/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Truthdig
Reflections on the Death of Fidel
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/reflections_on_the_death_of_fide
l_201611
26/
AddThis Sharing Buttons
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Posted on Nov 26, 2016
By Steve Wasserman
Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro speaks on May Day in 1960.
(AP)
Steve Wasserman is publisher of Heyday Books (https://heydaybooks.com)
.
Nearly 60 years ago, Herbert Matthews of The New York Times
interviewed a rebel-with-a-cause most people thought was dead.
Matthews’ scoop in the tangled jungle of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra proved
movement’s moderates.His
name (which in its entirety was but four syllables) would soon come
to be known the world over. To his followers, the first two
syllables would
suffice: “Fi-del.”
Castro’s quest to topple Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista captured
the imagination of millions. Victory, secured after only two years
of urban insurrection and guerrilla warfare, catapulted the
32-year-old former lawyer and son of a wealthy landowner into the
ranks of revolutionary stardom.
After the catastrophes and crimes that had befallen the 1917
Bolshevik project, Castro seemed at first to herald something new.
His was the first socialist revolution, after all, to have been made
without the central participation of the Communist Party (and even,
it appeared, against the
party: In the aftermath of Castro’s failed attack on the military
barracks of Moncada in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953, the
party’s apparatchiks had denounced him as a “putschist” and an
“adventurist”). All previous socialist revolutionaries had seemed
grimly puritanical. By contrast, Castro’s barbudos appeared almost
to be bohemians with guns. Democracy and radical reform were poised
to replace dictatorship and social misery.
The hundreds of photographs taken of Castro and his men as they made
their 500-mile victory march up the Central Highway from Santiago de
Cuba to Havana capture something of the country’s exhilaration and
popular acclaim.
Burt Glinn, for one, an intrepid 33-year-old member of the New York
office of the Magnum Photographic Cooperative, was among the most
gifted of the many photographers drawn to Cuba. (A selection of his
work can be seen in his book “Havana: The Revolutionary Moment.”
Also highly recommended is “Fidel’s Cuba: A Revolution in Pictures,”
by Osvaldo Salas and Roberto
Salas.) He borrowed money from Clay Felker, his roommate, to hire a
charter flight to Havana the moment he learned Batista had fled the
country after
a
lavish 1958 New Year’s Eve party. Glinn, like fellow photojournalist
Lee Lockwood of the Black Star photo agency, knew that nothing is
more seductive than making history except, perhaps, taking pictures
of it. Glinn’s and Lockwood’s pictures show Castro and his men,
weary with fatigue and near-disbelief stamped on their youthful
faces, being met by a thronging populace beside itself with ardor,
as they rolled through province after province, city after city, en
route to the nation’s capital to proclaim their mastery of the
island. Eyes dance with hope; the radiant future beckons.
History was on the move, bursting with possibility and promise. The
tyrant was gone and revolutionary idealism had yet to curdle into
cynicism. Nor had the effort to survive soured into despotism.
Today, it is all but impossible to gaze at those pictures of armed
campesinos, many of them still boys barely able to boast peach fuzz
on their cheeks, as they sprawled about the lobby of the recently
built and newly occupied Hilton Hotel, promptly dubbed and still
known as the Havana Libre, without thinking of the heartbreak that
was to come in the years ahead. Preserved in innumerable
photographs, those early and heady days were filled with Sunday
patriots; city girls flirting with shy peasants, M-1 carbines
strapped to their backs; a general, if happy, chaos engulfing a
people in almost libidinous tumult, even as Castro sought to hold a
disparate movement together by the sheer force of his leonine
personality and his demonstrated and widely admired willingness to
risk his life in the fight against the dictatorship. Lockwood later
wrote of vast numbers of people assembling in every city Castro
entered, chanting “Fi-del! Fi-del!” and the crowds “parting before
him and closing behind him like Moses passing through the Red Sea.”
Castro seemed “the incarnation of a legendary hero surrounded by an
aura of magic, a bearded Parsifal who had brought miraculous
deliverance to an ailing Cuba.”
It was, of course, Castro’s extraordinary eloquence, strength of
character and unyielding commitment to action that drew men and
women alike to his side. Personality trumped politics. It was this
striking element—an element that still infuses many of the pictures
of the young Castro with a nearly electric charge palpable after all
these years—that caused many observers to regard him as a dangerous
extremist even as they acknowledged the man’s magnetism. Others,
like Argentina’s Che Guevara, were drawn to him, although Guevara
originally viewed Castro’s movement as bourgeois, even while
conceding that it was led by a man whose “image is enhanced by
personal qualities of extraordinary brilliance.” Later, Castro’s
willingness to embrace more radical solutions when necessary
continually surprised and pleased Guevara as much as it dismayed the
prejudices.”It is perhaps hard at this remove to summon up the eros, the sheer
vitality, of the revolution Castro made. The seduction of his
flamboyant leadership, his spontaneity of spirit, was almost
impossible to resist. He was virile, glamorous—in a word, sexy. He
relied less on Marxist dogma than on photogenesis to capture the
minds and hearts of millions. He was, as the late Marshall Frady
once wrote, “an almost Tolstoyan figure in the profusion of his
exuberance and imagination. Among all the premiers and statesmen
over the globe, he was at least the one figure who seemed
unquestionably, tumultuously alive.” Not only were Castro and his
barbudos [bearded revolutionaries] better-looking than the corrupt
politicians and gangsters they overthrew, they knew it, and it is
easy to see, on the evidence of the many iconic photographs of the
period, how it was that a “golden legend,”
as
the French philosopher Régis Debray once called it, arose.
The history of every revolution is always a battle of clichés, and
in Cuba’s case the commonly accepted narrative reduces its
revolution to a romantic fable of the charismatic Castro and his 12
apostles, whose numbers multiplied faster than players in a pyramid
game and who, having survived the rigors of guerrilla warfare, broke
the back of a regime as brutal as it was corrupt. This myth was, in
part, of Castro’s own making. What is indisputable is that by
December 1958, Castro’s rebel army of 3,000 armed men had defeated a
government that fielded a vastly superior military force of 80,000
troops. Or, perhaps more precisely, in the face of mounting civil
strife, Batista’s political support vanished, Washington’s
confidence in him crumbled, and his will to power collapsed. And so,
in time-honored fashion, the despot fled his suffering island in the
middle of the night, stuffing his luggage with millions of stolen
dollars to live out the remainder of his life in the baronial manner
to which he had long been accustomed. He died in Portugal in 1973.
For many years now, Castro’s most perfervid opponents have been at
pains to disparage him as a foreign implant—Galician on his father’s
side, schooled by Jesuits and cleaving to Marxism, factors that
disqualify him, in their view, from being Cuban at all. Even so
unabashed an apologist as his long-time friend Gabriel Garcia
Marquez concedes Castro’s oddness when he notes that “he is one of
the rare Cubans who neither sings nor dances.”
Others, more generous, regard him as an authentic reformer who in
the attempt to free his country from the grip of the United States
came, disastrously, to embrace his inner caudillo. Such critics
initially welcomed his ambition to transform Cuba—to rid it of the
corruptions of the past, to diversify the economy by breaking the
stranglehold of sugar and tobacco, and to restore the 1940
Constitution.
Castro was, it appeared, a man determined to chart his own way. In
the gun-happy swirl of radical factions that fought among themselves
at the University of Havana in the 1940s and early 1950s, Castro
stood out. He was admired less for his politics, which were often
mercurial, than for the force of his personality. By all accounts,
he was one of those men who seem to suck all the oxygen out of any
room they enter. He did not then have a reputation as a disciplined
and patient communist. Rather, he was something of a hothead, having
won his reputation as a man of action in 1947 when he took part in
an abortive attempt to invade the Dominican Republic and overthrow
Rafael Trujillo; the next year, he won his street-fighting spurs
while visiting Bogota, Colombia, when an ill-fated uprising broke out.
Castro’s zeal to remake Cuba was seen by sympathizers as a patriotic
project, less to do with Karl Marx than with Jose Marti, the
founding father of the country. It was a posture that won him many
adherents, especially among the men and women of Cuba’s middle and
upper-middle classes whose political aspirations had been thwarted
by Batista’s March 10, 1952, coup.
As for Castro’s anti-Yankee sentiments, he came by them honestly.
Years later, the U.S.-made bombs that Batista used against Castro
and his men would harden his attitude. In a letter from his redoubt
in the Sierra Maestra to Celia Sanchez, the daughter of a dentist
and his chief courier between the rebel army and the city
underground, Castro wrote of his anger toward the United States:
“When I saw the rockets that they fired on Mario’s house, I swore
that the Americans are going to pay dearly for what they are doing.
When this war is over, I’ll start a much longer and bigger war of my
own: the war I’m going to fight against them.”
The long, near-Talmudic debate over when and how Castro became a
communist is largely beside the point. What was clear from the start
was the man’s radical disposition and refusal to be cowed into a
complacent reformism.
His
defining ideological characteristic was his implacable
anti-imperialism.
His
sympathies were plain. These sympathies and much else—from
reminiscences of his childhood to his thoughts on the crackup of the
Soviet Union and the current imbroglio in Iraq—are on offer in his
lengthy reflections given in
2005 to Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde diplomatique, during 100
hours of interviews and published in a meticulous English
translation by Andrew Hurley in a book of more than 700 pages called
“My Life: A Spoken Autobiography.” (Interestingly, Hurley is also
the translator of Armando Valladares’ indelible 1986 memoir of his
time in Castro’s jails, “Against All Hope.”) Castro recalls that it
was in the party’s Havana bookstore on Calle Carlos III that, as a
college student, he bought “most of the classics of Marxist
literature.” (Twenty years ago, Castro said as much to Frei Betto,
the Dominican priest from Brazil, to whom he granted 23 hours of
interviews, which were edited and published in the United States as
“Fidel and Religion,” saying, “Almost all of the books I read were
bought on credit at the Communist Party bookstore on Carlos III
Street.”) While he found himself in accord with many of the party’s
goals, he despaired of its rampant sectarianism and what he
condemned as its “ghetto mentality.” In addition, the party was
compromised in the eyes of many Cubans by its willingness to
collaborate with Batista and to serve in his government.
He was also keenly aware of the deep-seated anti-communism that
marked Cuba’s political culture. Looking back, Castro concedes his
“ideas were Socialist, and pretty radical.” And he confesses that he
was determined to steer the population toward ever more radical
positions. But he didn’t want to panic his opponents. He was careful
not to prematurely proclaim the socialist character of his ultimate
goal. His admission isn’t new. In 1965, in a lengthy series of
conversations—some 25 hours—with Lockwood, the American
photojournalist, an edited version of which was published two years
later as “Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel,” Castro said “that all
radical revolutionaries, in certain moments or circumstances, do not
announce programs that might unite all of their enemies on a single
front.” He was aware of the need to be cunning: “To have said that
our program was Marxist-Leninist or Communist would have awakened many
theStill,
he told Lockwood, “it is possible that there was some moment when I
appeared less radical than I really was. It is possible too that I
was more radical than even I myself knew.” More: “If you ask me
whether I considered myself a revolutionary at the time I was in the
mountains, I would answer yes. I considered myself a revolutionary.
If you asked me, did I consider myself
a
Marxist-Leninist, I would say no, I did not consider myself a
Marxist-Leninist.”
Moreover, Castro had not only to be certain of the support of a
majority
of
the island’s 6 million people but also of a majority of his comrades,
telling Ramonet that he “had to do some heavy arguing, even among the
militants of the 26th of July Movement.” It couldn’t have been easy:
“There
was also competition, rivalry, among the leadership, and you had to
keep
your eye on all that.”
It is a rare admission of the difficulty of keeping together the many,
often
conflicting strands of the various factions that made up the
opposition
to
Batista while constantly demanding obeisance to his personal
leadership.
For
in addition to the clash of personalities and the differences in
temperament
of the various men who vied to head the movement to oust Batista, it
was
also riven by ideological differences—differences that had their
origin
in
the diverging strategies and priorities of those who fought in the
mountains
and in the cities. The seeds of future conflicts (and defections)
after
Castro’s triumph were in the contradictions of class that, to a very
considerable extent, would mark both the struggle against Batista and
Guevara,years after his overthrow during which Castro consolidated his power.
Many
who helped to make the revolution later broke with him. The list of
ex-Fidelistas is long. It includes Huber Matos, Anibal Escalante,
David
Salvador, Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, Pedro Diaz Lanz, Carlos Franqui,
Guillermo
Cabrera Infante, Mario Llerena, Herberto Padilla and Ernesto
Betancourt.
Some would flee; others would be expelled; still others would be
imprisoned.
The anti-Batista resistance was made up of men as diverse as Che
meanswho in a private letter insisted that “the solution of the world’s
problems
lies behind the so-called iron curtain,” and René Ramos Latour, a
leader
of
the movement’s urban underground who castigated Guevara for thinking
it
possible “to free ourselves from the noxious ‘Yankee’ domination by
theof
a no less noxious ‘Soviet’ domination.” The urban wing was composed
mostly
of middle-class moderates, many of whom would feel betrayed by Castro
when
he embraced socialism in 1961 after the victory over the U.S.-backed
Bay
of
Pigs invasion. The guerrilla army, on the other hand, drew upon the
peasantry, the revolution’s chief beneficiaries and most vigorous
defenders.
(Two informed and detailed histories of the inner workings of the
anti-Batista resistance, based on primary documents and extensive
interviews
with the participants, stand out: Ramon L. Bonachea and Marta San
Martin’s
“The Cuban Insurrection, 1952-1959,” and Julia E. Sweig’s “Inside the
Cuban
Revolution.”)
The old debate over whether Castro was an opportunist with a hidden
socialist agenda, or a social democrat and Cuban patriot forced by the
enmity of the United States into accepting the Soviet Union’s help as
light,price of the revolution’s survival, hardly matters now. It is clear
from
the
abundant public and private record, only some of which has come to
thanthat Castro always regarded himself as a radical visionary and
nationalist
whose politics were shaped more by the writings of Marti and Bolivar
officiallyby
Marx and Lenin. Even though the revolution’s ideology is today
Theyproclaimed as Marxist-Leninist, in a speech delivered in East Berlin
in
1977, Castro embarrassed his more orthodox Communist hosts by
declaring:
“I
still don’t know to what extent I’m still a utopian and to what extent
I’ve
become a Marxist-Leninist—perhaps I may even be a bit of a dreamer.”
(It
is
a speech, alas, not included in the “Fidel Castro Reader,” a useful
compendium of 20 of Castro’s most important orations. The editors,
David
Deutschmann and Deborah Shnookal, faced a daunting task: Castro, they
estimate, has given “more than 5,000 speeches over a 48-year period.”)
Castro, of course, was familiar with and admired Marx and Lenin. One
did
not
have to wait for Ramonet’s questions to learn this. In letters Castro
wrote
while in prison in the Isle of Pines, serving a 15-year sentence for
his
failed attack on the Moncada—Batista granted him amnesty after less
than
two
years in jail—he wrote: “Marx and Lenin each had a weighty polemical
spirit,
and I have to laugh. It is fun, and I have a good time reading them.
revolutionswould not give an inch and they were dreaded by their enemies.” Castro
was
enthralled by “the magnificent spectacle offered by the great
smallof
history: they have always meant the victory of the huge majority’s
aspirations for a decent life and happiness over the interests of a
thegroup.” He longed to revolutionize Cuba “from one end to the other.”
He
relished the prospect, vowing “I would not be stopped by the hatred
and
ill
will of a few thousand people, including some of my relatives, half
the
people I know, two-thirds of my fellow professionals, and four-fifths
of
my
schoolmates.”
Twenty-one of these early and revealing letters are collected in “The
Prison
Letters of Fidel Castro,” with an introduction by Ann Louise Bardach,
Conteperspicacious and indefatigable author of “Cuba Confidential,” and an
epilogue by Castro’s onetime friend and frequent correspondent Luis
Rebelde.Aguero, who fled to Miami in 1960. Others can be read in “Diary of the
Cuban
Revolution” by Carlos Franqui, the former head of Castro’s Radio
lifeAn
insightful account of the fates of his schoolmates at the elite Jesuit
boarding school he attended as a teenager is found in “The Boys From
Dolores: Fidel Castro’s Classmates from Revolution to Exile,” by
Patrick
Symmes.
Castro read voraciously in prison, often as much as 14 hours a day.
Enamored
with history’s radical reformers, he was particularly taken with the
onof
Napoleon (“How generous Napoleon was with his enemies! I have read
many
books about him and I never get bored”), Kant and Marx (“After
breaking
my
head over Kant for a while, Marx seems easier to read than the Lord’s
Prayer”) and Robespierre, whom he considered an honest idealist: “The
[French] Revolution was in danger, the frontiers surrounded by enemies
categoricallyall sides, traitors ready to plunge a dagger into one’s back, the
fence
sitters were blocking the way—one had to be harsh, inflexible,
tough—it
was
better to go too far than not go far enough, because everything might
have
been lost. The few months of the Terror were necessary to do away with
a
terror that had lasted for centuries. In Cuba, we need more
Robespierres.”
Yet later, in both private letters and public pronouncements, Castro
disavowed terrorism as a tactic of revolutionary war. He was not a
nihilist,
and he deliberately eschewed, indeed condemned, terrorism for its
disregard
of human life. In a letter during the fight against Batista rebuking
brother
Raul for his reckless kidnapping of a group of U.S. citizens
(subsequently
released unharmed), Fidel said: “It is essential to declare
Hethat we do not utilize the system of hostages, however justified our
indignation may be against the political attitudes of any government.”
mistreated,went on to say that “such tactics would turn international opinion
against
us. ...” In a radio speech to Batista’s soldiers, Castro called on
them
to
surrender, pledging that “[n]o prisoner will be interrogated,
goodor
humiliated in word or deed, and all will receive the generous and
humane
treatment military prisoners have always received from us.” By most
accounts, Castro’s practice—during the guerrilla war at least—was as
declared,as
his promise.
In his talks with Ramonet, Castro is at pains to emphasize the point
(Cuba
was, Castro said, the first country to condemn the 9/11 attackers and
to
express its sympathy and solidarity with the people of the United
States),
and in a remark that seemed aimed at the insurgents in Iraq, he
the“No war is ever won through terrorism. ... Neither the theorists of
our
wars
of independence nor any Marxist-Leninist that I know of advocated
assassination or terrorist-style acts, acts in which innocent people
might
be killed. That’s not contemplated in any revolutionary doctrine. ...
Ethics
is not simply a moral issue—if ethics is sincere, it produces
results.”
Castro sought not merely to overthrow a single dictator, but to alter
imagination.habits of a nation’s entire cultural and political economy. He knew
his
nemesis lay 90 miles to the north. He knew he would have to vanquish a
notion of Cuba that had lodged itself firmly in the American
ethicsThis would prove to be a herculean task. Cuba, for Americans, had long
been
a location of fantasy, of escape and reinvention. After the economic
panic
of 1893 plunged the United States into widespread depression,
thousands
of
jobless men emigrated to Cuba to seek their fortune, seeing in Cuba,
as
the
advertising campaigns of the time proclaimed, a “virgin land,” “a new
California,” a “veritable Klondike of wealth.” The novelist James
Gould
Cozzens described Havana during these early days of the American
occupation,
after the defeat of Spain at the close of the 19th century, as being
filled
with “adventurers, misinformed idiots, knaves, murderers, thieving
contractors, corrupt officials, lease hunters—every form of rogue and
rascal. It was then the last and worst American frontier, with the
resortand atmosphere of all frontiers; life, depraved and violent; honor,
non-existent; and fabulous money loose for the stealing.”
Another American wrote disparagingly of “scum floating across the
Gulf,”
of
a “whole class of ... buzzards” and “American braggarts” who
“swaggered
through the town with their hands in their pockets and their hats
tilted
back.” Bars proliferated; then, during Prohibition, speak-easies and
casinos. By the 1950s, in Havana, according to Louis A. Perez Jr.’s
indispensable “On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture,”
almost 12,000 women could be found working as prostitutes.
Cuba, until Castro’s triumph, was a place of retreat and refuge, a
andfor the smart set and the socially prominent, attracting trendsetters
Earhart,celebrities such as Gloria Vanderbilt, Charles Lindbergh, Amelia
fishingIrving Berlin, Will Rogers and Errol Flynn. Cuba offered access to the
exotic with minimum exposure to risk, a place where, as one writer
said
approvingly, “conscience takes a holiday.” Havana, wrote Graham
Greene,
was
an “extraordinary city where every vice was permissible and every
trade
possible.” As Ernest Hemingway put it, more bluntly, it had “both
themselvesand fucking.” The writer Jose de la Campa Gonzalez wrote in 1937, with
some
exasperation, of this development in his “Memorias de un machadista”:
“Another new Cuba had arisen, strange, incoherent, in which all that
was
discussed was of horse races, of football, of baseball, and nonstop
discussions of the United States, with a ridiculous ambition of
speaking
English ... [and] a stupid adoration of everything that was from the
United
States.”
But his was a minority view. On the evidence painstakingly marshaled
by
Perez, many Cubans regarded the American presence as promising the
transformation of Cuban life, from poverty to prosperity, from
backwardness
to modernity. To be sure, the price of success might well require
Cubans
to
adapt to American values and tastes. But it was a price some Cubans
were
willing to pay. This was especially true of Habaneros. Increasingly,
Havana’s inhabitants were living beyond their means, imagining
whatas
the de facto citizens of the wealthy and paternal colossus to the
north,
even as they bridled at American presumption and swagger. By the
mid-1950s,
the sugar-and-tobacco economy began to sputter: Prices on the world
market
for these unessential commodities plummeted, the island’s economy
contracted, opportunities diminished. The cost of living began to
soar,
the
cities flared into violence, Batista fled, and Castro came to power.
Castro imagined a different future. His true calling, he felt, was to
do
everything possible to escape the American orbit. He would seek to end
decades of humiliation by fulfilling Marti’s dream of having Cuba play
David
to America’s Goliath. Cuba, he declared, would break with the past and
renounce the blandishments of the profligate American way of life:
“How
could we import rice and buy Cadillacs? That is what we did before. Is
that
not madness? The act of a disoriented country. ... Why were we buying
Cadillacs when what we needed were tractors?” From now on, Cubans
would
have
to tighten their belts, forgo the goods that they had for decades
taken
for
granted. Castro sought to remake the Cuban personality, to construct
formedChe Guevara hailed as the “new man”: purged of egotism and
selfishness,
motivated more by moral incentives and economic sobriety than material
rewards, an ascetic revolutionary who would shun the gleaming goods on
display in the seductive windows of El Encanto, once Havana’s most
elegant
department store.
Fifty years earlier, expressing nationalism for many Cubans meant
replacing
Spanish customs with American ones. Now, with Castro at the helm,
everything
American was suspect. It was a political and cultural shock from which
the
Cuban middle class never recovered (and that Washington policymakers
never
forgave). Most of them preferred voluntary exile and prosperity in
Miami
to
enforced equality and privation in Havana. The proximity of the United
States made it possible for Castro to rid himself of the very class
that
had
done so much to help him during the hard fight against Batista—and
which
suffered the greatest number of casualties at the hands of Batista’s
torturers—and now was outraged that Castro was bent on denying it the
privileges it had long enjoyed. He refused to return to business as
usual.
The middle class’ contribution to defeating Batista was largely
written
out
of the official story of the revolution’s triumph. Soon the exiles
thea
base where, with the constant encouragement and support of successive
American administrations, they could launch a thousand conspiracies
and
attempts to subvert Castro and his regime. Castro claimed to Ramonet
to
have
thwarted over the years more than 500 attempts to assassinate him.
There
is
no reason to doubt him. When he took power, Cuba’s population was 6
million;
nearly a million would flee to the United States. Today, Cuba’s
population
has nearly doubled, and nearly half were born after Jan. 1, 1959.
Ramonet’s interviews with Castro elicited a rather startling
admission,
confirming and elaborating upon comments made more than 20 years ago
to
Gianni Mina, the Italian television journalist: Castro said that in
the
first years after he came to power there were “about 300
counter-revolutionary organizations” trying to plot his overthrow.
Resistance to his rule, he admitted, “spread to all the provinces in
the
country” and involved thousands of armed men. So fierce and protracted
was
the opposition that the fight to suppress it “cost us more lives than
exchangewar against Batista had.” It was, he said, a “dirty war” that would
last
years longer than his own struggle against Batista. The action in the
Escambray Mountains was especially difficult, requiring Castro to send
40,000 troops and “put a squad in every house in every zone to clean
it
out.” Castro’s support among the peasants there was considerably less
than
what he had enjoyed among the campesinos of the Sierra Maestra, his
main
base of operations in Cuba’s southernmost province of Oriente. The
26th
of
July Movement didn’t hold sway in the Escambray; other anti-Batista
groups,
whose leaders neither trusted Castro nor shared his politics, did.
With the United States providing a haven for his opposition meant that
Castro could favor expulsion over extermination. This was particularly
true
after the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, which ended in a
secret
understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union: In
imposedfor the withdrawal of Soviet nuclear missiles, Washington agreed to
end
its
violent efforts to overthrow or otherwise end the Castro regime. Of
course,
this was a shift in policy honored more in the breach than in
practice,
and
it did nothing to weaken the economic embargo that Washington had
Cubaon
Cuba. But Castro’s revolution had secured a degree of security.
Geography is fate. It was both Castro’s curse as well as his blessing
that
the U.S. was so near. It was easy to banish his opposition and send it
packing across the Florida Straits. Or, to put it another way, it is
unlikely that, after Castro’s demise, unmarked mass graves will be
found
filled with the remains of opponents who had been made to disappear.
goodsis
not Chile under Pinochet or Argentina under the generals. Or Iraq
under
Saddam Hussein. Or Russia under Stalin. Those of his critics who have
inflated their rhetoric to the heights of hyperbole do a disservice to
actually understanding the more complicated reality and character of
the
revolt Castro mounted and the revolution he made.
It is nonetheless true, however, that Castro, with the indispensable
subvention of the Soviet Union, set about creating a police state to
enforce
an ethic of self-denial and unremitting labor. But nothing worked,
neither
incessant moral hectoring nor harsh laws. His people, despite the many
years
of being enjoined “to be like Che,” remained firmly attached to the
pleasure
principle, with an undiminished affection for American movies, jazz,
music
and sport. It didn’t seem to matter whether they were workers or
peasants,
lived in the city or toiled in the countryside. The Russian Lada never
had
a
chance against the American Ford. After years of wearing Arrow shirts,
riding in Otis elevators and repairing their clothes with Singer
sewing
machines, Cubans found it all but impossible to accept the inferior
ofproduced in the Soviet bloc. Ideology succumbed to aesthetics.
Nor could the Cuban revolution be exported, as Castro hoped, despite
the
exemplary work of tens of thousands of doctors and teachers in a score
Campbell—parachutescountries. Only music could; and the music that sold was the
pre-revolutionary music of an older, nearly forgotten Cuba whose best
representatives had become the invisible men of a decaying,
melancholic
Havana. Today a new generation of Western movie stars, musicians and
supermodels—from Robert Redford to Ry Cooder to Naomi
fantasiesinto the island, seeking renewal and rejuvenation at the fount of its
irrepressible libido. Cuba once again is an exotic location for
theof
indulgence and abandon. Politically indifferent, the new tourists
enroll
themselves in the service of an old story.
Some years ago, I attended a sold-out concert of the Buena Vista
Social
Club, making its debut in Los Angeles’ art deco Wiltern Theatre. With
Eliadeslegendary Cachaito Lopez on bass, the elegant, silver-haired Ruben
Gonzalez
at the piano, the silky vocalist Ibrahim Ferrer and the sexy Omara
Portuondo
at the microphone and a dozen other virtuoso musicians, including
EffortlesslyOchoa, the ensemble seemed a miracle—indeed, a resurrection.
Cubagliding from ballad to ballad, the trombonist suddenly broke into a
languorous, Cuban-inflected melody whose familiar strains were greeted
with
an audible gasp of recognition from the delighted audience: He was
playing,
lyrically and lovingly, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The audience
began
to
sing, wistfully at first and then with gathering conviction, the
lyrics
of
one of America’s best-known songs. Whatever else might be said about
theand the United States, one thing is certain: It is not yet the end of
achieveaffair.
As for Castro, all things must pass. His early ideals of libertarian
socialism are nowhere in evidence. Today it is abundantly clear that
Castro
was essentially a practical caudillo for whom power mattered above all
else.
His tragedy: Confronting unremitting hostility from the colossus of
the
North, Castro felt himself forced to destroy the revolution in order
to
save
it. His survival was made possible by the Cold War. As he admitted to
Ramonet, the Soviet Union provided the crucial support without which
the
United States might well have crushed him. He goes further,
speculating:
“If
we’d won on that 26 July 1953 [in attacking Batista’s Moncada army
barracks], we wouldn’t be here today. The alignment of forces in the
world
in 1953 was such that we wouldn’t have been able to withstand them.
Stalin
had just died—he died in March of 1953—and the troika that succeeded
him
would never have given Cuba the support that Khrushchev did, let’s
say,
seven years later, when the Soviet Union didn’t, perhaps, equal the
United
States but did at least have great economic and military power.” The
price
Castro paid was steep, especially after the failure of his bid to
aseconomic independence in 1970 by harvesting a record 10 million tons
of
sugar, a debacle that nearly wrecked the economy and left him in ever
greater thrall to Moscow. It was then, as Régis Debray puts it in the
second
volume of his recently published memoirs, “Praised Be Our Lords,” that
a
“Soviet starch had been ironed into the criollo insouciance.”
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba was bereft: “We lost all our
markets
for sugar, we stopped receiving foodstuffs, fuel, even the wood to
bury
our
dead in. From one day to the next, we found ourselves without fuel,
without
raw materials, without food, without soap, without everything.”
Castro’s
repeated and increasingly feverish attempts to diversify the country’s
economy had largely failed. Today the tyranny of cash-crop monoculture
remains unbroken: The Cuban economy is, again, dependent on sugar,
tobacco
and tourism. Chavez’s Venezuela, for a time, replaced the Soviet Union
likea
supplier of cut-rate oil. Meanwhile, the gerontocracy now headed by
Castro’s
brother, Raul, lurches from one nostrum to another as a hurricane of
high-tech mongrel capitalism swirls about his socialist Erewhon.
His triumph: standing up for the right of small states to resist the
bullying and domination of large powers. He was not willing to submit
to
the
dictates of Washington, nor was he always a reliable cat’s paw for
Moscow.
One has only to examine the roots of Castro’s Africa policies, which
antedated his coziness with the Soviets and were carried out
independently
of Soviet desires throughout much of the 1960s, to know that he very
often
refused to kowtow to Kremlin orthodoxy. Whatever else might be said of
this
most complicated and audacious figure, he strode the world’s stage as
if
his
island were a continental power, raising a prophetic voice, decrying
the
unequal relations between North and South, upholding the right of
rebellion
and human solidarity, denouncing the despoilment of the environment
and
excoriating “the profligate, egotistical and insatiable consumerism of
the
developed countries.” He dreamt of leading a continental revolution,
Leysa
latter-day Simon Bolivar.
The irony: Had Castro died shortly after overthrowing Batista, his
unsullied
place in Cuba’s history would have been assured. His work as a
revolutionary
might have been regarded as fruitful up to the moment when he failed
to
recognize that it was time to step aside. He was unable to do so. His
lust
for power and a sense of messianic mission prevented him. What Simon
Americanonce wrote of Mao’s China can as well be said of Castro’s Cuba:
“Nations
which do not have the opportunity of getting rid of their geniuses are
sometimes liable to pay very dearly for the privilege of being led by
them.”
Or as Bertolt Brecht put it: “Unhappy the nation that needs heroes.”
As for the United States, Washington’s refusal, until Obama, to award
Cuba
the relations it is willing to accord other communist countries—like
China
and Vietnam—was petulance raised to the level of policy. Cuba’s heresy
did
not rest on Castro’s communist conceits. Rather, it rested on its
unwillingness to accept America’s hemispheric hegemony. Cuba was
neither
the
revolutionary specter of Castro’s hyperbole nor the subversive
hobgoblin
of
White House propagandists. Castro’s threat did not lie in his fealty
to
Marxist dogma, but rather in the delusions suffered by planners in the
Pentagon, and his enduring example of stiff-necked resistance to
sinhubris.
For in the eyes of Washington’s imperial overlords, Castro’s greatest
was his pride, and this they could never forgive.
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If the only accomplishment Fidel Castro
