Mendacious propaganda tries to turn Venezuela into another Cuba

www.vheadline.com Posted: Monday, March 24, 2003 By: Hector Dauphin-Gloire

Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 21:45:40 -0500 From: Hector Dauphin-Gloire montonero22@hotmail.com To: editor@vheadline.com Subject: Venezuela, Cuba, and Fidel

Dear Editor: There has been a lot of mendacious propaganda recently concerning how President Chavez is allegedly trying to turn Venezuela into another Cuba.

Left unsaid in all this is the presumption that Cuba is some sort of totalitarian hellhole that any decent person would want to avoid like the plague. But it is false to claim that Cuba is some sort of totalitarian terror that must be avoided at all costs.

In point of fact, in spite of the many problems and criticisms I have of the Castro regime, it must be acknowledged that they have done a better job at securing stability, social solidarity, and a decent standard of living for their people than most countries in the region; and while there certainly has been political repression, the fact is that human rights have been better protected in Cuba than in most Latin American countries historically.

Those who conclude that, because Cuba calls itself a Communist country, it must therefore be a tropical clone of Stalin's Russia, cannot have paid close attention to the historical record.

As a non-Communist (I am in fact highly critical of most communist countries, of Marxism as a philosophy, and of the totally unprincipled record of most world communist parties) but one sympathetic to the Cuban experience, I feel I must comment.

Let us consider, for a moment, a few facts about the historical record of socialism in Cuba. Let's consider the specific claims that the Cuban regime has disrespected human rights. One must first ask, what are human rights, or to put it another way, what are the obligations that society has to the individual?

If one accepts the general definition given by Simone Weil that these obligations involve satisfying man's spiritual as well as material needs, then we must observe that the Cuban regime has in fact provided food, housing, health care and education to all its people, something that only a few Latin American countries have done -- and something that democracies like India, to say nothing of the US itself, are still light years away from achieving.

What sort of "human rights" are being respected in the standard model of a developing-world neoliberal democracy -- the right to starve, to be without housing or without an education?

At least up until the loss of its main trade partner, these rights were met at a high level in Cuba. Today, Cuba doesn't have a whole lot of wealth to go around, it is a very poor country -- but in spite of that, everyone has the basic necessities of life, which is the most fundamental human right there is.

But more than that, Cuba has carried out a transformation in people's consciousness. They have created a society where people strive to fulfill themselves through helping others and serving the greater good, and where something more than power and money are the drivers of human relations.

For this and this alone they deserve praise, for creating a society where greed and pride are actively de-emphasized, and where true equality has been approximated more than anywhere else in the world.

What about the political repression, the executions, the lack of competitive elections that we hear so much about in Cuba?

To begin with, remember that the 10,000 or so political executions that have taken place in Cuba were almost all following either the civil war of 1957-1958, or the Playa Giron invasion ... and were of people that, by any standard were guilty of terrible crimes -- torture, civilian bombing, murder, corruption, treasonous invasion of their own homeland.

Consider how the French Resistance dealt with the Vichy collaborators after the victory of 1945, and then ask yourself if by that standard the executions carried out by Castro and Guevara were more along the lines of Stalinist terror, or were they more along the lines of justice?

Lest I seem to imply that all of the people executed by the Castro regime were guilty of war crimes, it is certainly not true (certainly innocent people were put to death mistakenly in the regime's excessive zeal to punish the guilty) but I do believe that most of them were guilty of such crimes. I also believe that such abuses, while terrible when they occur, are characteristic of all societies going through periods of war and revolution, and do not fall into the pathological model of Stalinist totalitarianism, where anyone who was or might potentially be a threat to Stalin, or simply not supportive enough, was summarily executed.

Cuba has been authoritarian, I believe, but not totalitarian -- more along the lines of Hapsburg Austria, or France in 1945, than Stalinist Russia.

My family background stems from a developing country (not in Latin America) which is a textbook example of democracy -- yet in spite of that, political violence, corruption, arbitrary arrest and police torture are commonplace occurrences.

Say what you will about Cuba, they don't have extra-judicial executions, and torture is now a thing of the past.

Yes, you can lose your job or be arrested for speaking subversively about the government, and, while that is wrong, one must bear in mind that countries under siege from a foreign power (the US) ... which has tried to overthrow it by means ranging from propaganda to outright violence ... can often not afford to be liberal.

Where are human rights better respected -- in a country like India, where you can participate in competitive elections and freely speak your mind, but run the risk of arbitrary arrest, political assassination, and be stifled by daily corruption ... or in Cuba, where you are protected against these practices, even if you do lack the right of free speech?

And let's remember that while Cuba arrested its dissidents, it did not kill them in the way that regimes like Argentina, Chile, or Guatemala chose to do.

My closest friend has worked in Cuba, and he attests to the fact that he saw better relations between the police and the people in Cuba than in any other country he has seen including the USA. In much of the US, people actively fear the police; in Cuba, my friend says, he saw people relating to the police as equals, on a friendly basis. Cuba is called a 'police state' by its enemies ... but this account seems to question that assumption.

And I haven't even begun to touch Cuban foreign policy.

While Cuba (like every country) was in bed with a lot of unsavory characters (like the genocidal Ethiopian tyrant, Mengistu) they also did more than any other country to liberate Nicaragua from the Somoza tyranny, South Africa and Namibia from apartheid and countries like Angola from Portuguese colonialism.

This is but a brief attempt to counter some myths about Cuba, Venezuela's closest friend and ally at the current moment in time.

I am sure that there will be comments regarding this, and I hope to deal with some more issues that I expect will come up in the course of those responses.

Sincerely, Hector Dauphin-Gloire montonero22@hotmail.com Environmental Technician