> At 08:50 AM 05/01/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>> Well in the absence of democratic elections in Cuba, who actually knows
>> what
>> the self-determination of the Cuban people is? Which is precisely the
>> problem. By having a dictatorship, Castro opens the door to a range of
>> people to speak in the name of the Cuban people, since they can't speak
>> for
>> themselves. Which makes a Bush invasion more possible since it will be
>> done
>> in the name of the Cuban people with plenty of Miami Cubans speaking in
>> the
>> name of a country whose people cannot themselves speak without risking
>> jail.
>
> On the PEN-L list, Louis Proyect, wrote:
From: Michael Pugliese <debsian at pacbell.net> Reply-To: debsian at pacbell.net To: "asdnet at igc.topica.com" <asdnet at igc.topica.com> Subject: Arnold August, Cuba and a Possible Credibility Gap Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2003 21:20:59 -0800 <URL: http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/psn/2003/msg01289.html > One of Proyect's sources, cadre in the Enver Hoxha M-L fan club led by Hardial Bains aka Hardly Any Brains. http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/psn/2003/msg01289.html
Arnold August, Cuba and a Possible Credibility Gap by Paul Stevenson 27 April 2003 01:03 UTC While I appreciate Louis Proyect's identification of August's work on Cuba (apparently out-of-print on Amazon.com) and I have only been able to read what Proyect and other reviewers have had to say about this book, i.e I have not read the book, a brief background check of August raises some disturbing questions. A story in the March 15th, 1990 edition of the Montreal Gazette by Ingrid Peritz indicated that Arnold August was a member of the Communist Party of Canada - Marxist-Leninist. Its position, at the time, was that with the collapse of Eastern Europe and other Communist regimes (most of which they considered bourgeois anyways) left only Albania standing as the last bastion of Marxist socialism. "'Albania is the only country in the world where genuine socialism is being built,' said August, 45, secretary of the Montreal branch of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)." Perhaps he's grown up since then. But there remains a scepticism about the perceptions and interpretations of these people. Like post-modernists they tend to see only what they want to see and ignore all other facets of reality. In the late sixties and early seventies the CPC-ML was a fanatical, juvenile and ultra-leftist adventurist organization (I know I had to deal with them often) which, at the time, was often suspected as being an organization of agent-provocateurs. Their defense of Stalin and Stalinism, and their actual behaviour was abominable. Perhaps we can move forward and deal with the specific empirical details of the Cuban experience including those presented by August. Cheers, Paul Stevenson Sociology University of Winnipeg Progressive Sociology Network List Archives at CSF Subscribe to Progressive Sociology Network