[lbo-talk] Cuban HDI

[andie nachgeborenen]

Brad, you are not talking to an SWP defender of Castroism. I am a critic of Castro's tyranny and repression. However, I also think that the Cuban revolution has some significant accomplishments, and has done better for the Cuban people than any likely alternative the US would install. I have challenged you to explain why this is not so. What I get from a Berkeley social scientist is overheated rhetoric.  The Cubans should adopt the American Bill of Rights (which the US is in the process of shredding at home, something which has not attracted your ire, I note). I'd like to see that, but there is is the concern that the US would abuse an open political process to swamp Cuba with right wing consultants, propaganda, media spinmeisters, dirty tricks, and well-funded pet Gusano or "dissident" candidates. You say (without a  shred of evidence) that Clinton would have been a good boy, but even if so, and I deny it, Georgie Porgie wouldn't be. Your reply, stripped of the emotion, is that if the Cuban revolution is so great, there's no problem, people will just see through the lies. This represents a level of naivete about electoral politics and political psychology so vast thatit is hard to credit, but I have to remind myself that you _are_  an economist, and things that things about the the way the world works ordinary people (as well as those of use with training in political science) take for granted have been trained out of you and replaced in your models by Rational Economic Man. Of course the propaganda blitzes work -- they work here, or the Republicans would never win an election!  Besides, you have failed to address the concern(s) that (1) an election under those conditions would not be free and fair, and(2) the (Robert) Jacksonian thought that, even were Cuba to adopt the Bill of Rights, it's not a suicide pact.  I repeat: I do not justify or defend Cuban repression. I deplore it. But I genuinely don't know what to say about what the Cubans should do. I would like them to adopt the Bill of Rights, but I know tha
t the US would not leave them alone.  Incidentally, I find your allusion to Orwell's 1984 puzzling here. I was just looking up that passage the other day, thinking about how the US switched on Iraq (a "legitimate govt" in its war against our enemies the Iranians in the 1980s). But hasn't the US has indeed always been at war with Cuba under Castro, and with communism generally, apart from a brief alliance of necessity during WWII. Are you accusing me of forgotteing the time whem the US was allied with Cuba in fighting the repressive dictatorships in El Salvador and Guatemala? I do forgot that time, when was it, Brad? jks

Brad DeLong <delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:>Clinton was big pals with Mas Canosa and the Gusano, I mean right 
>wing exile movement in Miami. That's how he nailed down Florida. He 
>did nothing about the blockade, Radio Marti, etc. So, no, I don't 
>think Clinton's policy was the benign neglect I'd like to see. It 
>was pretty consistent with the previous 30 years of post Bay of 
>Pigs hostility. Although Clinton's (and Bush I's, etc) policies 
>towards almost everyone were better than the Shrub's, I think you're 
>naive to suppose that Clinton would have allowed a fair and free 
>election to proceed in Cuba without Nicaraguanizing it. jks

You know, there is a certain "Oceania has always been at war with 
Eurasia" tone here. Castro's regime is claimed to be progressive, and 
popular, and one of the few gems of light in a dark world. Castro's 
regime is also so fragile that Castro has no choice but to send 
dissidents to jail for decades and rig every election--for otherwise 
Radio Marti will hypnotize the people and lead them to vote it out of 
office.

One of the great victories of the Eurocommunist movement was to have 
gotten the western Far Left to commit to the priority of bourgeois 
emancipation--that freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to 
organize, and multi-party elections were key foundations without 
which nothing good could be built. It is curious to see such 
extraordinary backsliding in the interest of propping up an old 
dictator.

Lenin, after all, thought that the "dictatorship" part was temporary, 
until the state withered away and the government of men could be 
replaced by the administration of things. Castro thinks that the 
dictatorship is permanent.

Brad DeLong
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