AfroCubism

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-11-03/music/afrocubism-emerges-at-last/

AfroCubism Emerges at Last

A Mali-Cuba connection, 14 years in the making, is finally forged

By Tad Hendrickson

Most Buena Vista Social Club fans remember the group’s backstory: elite Cuban musicians coaxed out of retirement in 1996 for sessions designed to mingle them with their Malian counterparts, except the African stars made the mistake of trying to handle their visa applications by mail. They never made it, the Cubans soldiered on alone, and the rest, as they say, is eight-times-platinum history.Fourteen years later, producer Nick Gold has finally revisited his original concept. The resulting record, AfroCubism, features BVSC guitarist Eliades Ochoa (the cowboy hat-wearing singer of the hit “Chan Chan”) and his band, Grupo Patria, alongside ngoni master Bassekou Kouyate, guitarist Djelimady Tounkara, and a few other Malian ringers, including kora titan Toumani Diabaté. Throw around the phrase “Afro-Cuban,” and usually a blustery Latin-jazz vortex with Mario Bauza and Machito at its center comes to mind, but this is a different animal altogether: The big brass riffing and conga drums are supplanted by an earthier, string-based tradition, the similar-sounding guitar, ngoni, and kora shimmering together with the same subtlety that made BVSC so alluring, inviting Yoruban spirits to the campfire rather than trying to chase them away with the blast of a horn.

The album opens with the self-explanatory instrumental “Mali Cuba,” the bouncy melody complemented by brief, introductory solos by several players, the result a prologue of sorts leading straight to the heart of the matter: “Al Vaiven De Mi Carretta,” which translates to “The Swaying of My Cart.” This Cuban classic, written by Ñico Saquito, is here driven by Ochoa’s robust guitar and vocals, yet the Africans immediately line up behind him: Vocalist Kasse Mady Diabaté sings alternating verses as the strings add subtle accents to each lyrical line about the plight of poor farmers. Something magical happens on one of the last choruses, with keening African voices perfectly rising up together with the incantatory Cubans.

And then, the reverse happens: The Malian classic “Karamo” (or “The Hunter”) shifts the focus to a griot performing in an African town square, the music dense as Kasse Mady Diabaté’s voice and Toumani Diabaté’s kora fly above the percolating polyrhythms. The vocals are in Swahili, but they have a Spanish exclamatory element to them, and Kouyate and Tounkara handle their instruments in an almost Cuban-like style, tightening up their exploratory lines to something more forceful and tuning their instruments to a Western musical scale.

Both tunes are about as perfect a blend of AfroCubism‘s two dominant cultures as you’ll ever find; the rest of the album sustains that high. As it turns out, Mali was Cuban-music crazy from the ’50s to the ’70s, as friendly governments oversaw globe-trotting cultural exchanges. Mali’s music scene, the crown jewel of Africa, is consequently deeply indebted to Cuban music, with popular bands like Orchestra Baobab, the Star Band, Djelimady’s Rail Band, and others bringing Cuban flair both to the radio and the clubs. This 14-track tribute alternates between the two countries, never leaning too far in either direction as it shifts from Cuban treasures to traditional griot numbers to original unions of the two. “Fusion” can be a dirty word, but not here: At long last, Gold and his cohorts have achieved something that lives up to its original promise, a direct link between the Old World and the new.

The AfroCubism band plays Town Hall November 9

Sugar and the Cuban economy

I have begun reading the first of two books about the Cuban economy that have been written fairly recently. They are collections of articles by Cuban economists and Americans who might be described as Cubanologists like Carmelo Mesa-Lago (originally from Cuba) whose anti-Communism is a bit more nuanced than what you find in the academy (Mesa-Lago is quoted frequently by the state caps.)

In the first book, there’s a long and very instructive article by Brian Pollitt, a British economist who has been studying sugar production in Cuba for 30 years. I will be reporting on it when I begin a series of posts about the Cuban economy, but will say at this point that it makes an observation that reminds me of the problems of the Nicaraguan economy under the FSLN, namely that structural changes in the rural sector that are intended to benefit the poor frequently have unintended consequences:

George Vickers pointed these contradictions out in an article in the June 1990 “NACLA Report on the Americas” entitled “A Spider’s Web.” He noted that the Agrarian Reform provided a reduction in rents, greater access to credit and improved prices for basic grains. This meant that small peasants had no economic pressure on them to do the backbreaking work of harvesting export crops on large farms. Even when wages increased on these large farms, the campesino avoided picking cotton on the large farms. Who could blame them?

full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/state_and_revolution/nicaragua.htm

In a nutshell, something similar has happened in Cuba. Pollitt points out that there’s been a big drop in sugar production because rural workers cannot be pressured into cutting cane through manual labor. After the end of Soviet aid, there’s been a crisis in the sugar industry because of a failure to replace aging machinery in the sugar fields. There are still many sugar fields that can be harvested but only by hand. Like Nicaragua, there is a problem getting people liberated from an oppressive plantation economy to do the kind of work that they once did.

I just spotted an article by Pollitt on MRZine this morning that might explore these questions. I strongly recommend a read:

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/pollitt061010.html

 

Alexander Cockburn, Marc Cooper, and Castro’s Cuba

Recent changes taking place in Cuba and statements regarding these changes made by retired head of state Fidel Castro have gotten a couple of journalists associated with the liberal Nation Magazine all hot and bothered.

One of them is Alexander Cockburn, whose column now appears only once a month—an obvious function of the magazine’s displeasure with Cockburn’s enmity toward their beloved occupant of the White House. Cockburn, now pushing 70, was at one time on the payroll of prestigious and well-paying print publications like the Wall Street Journal and House and Garden. Except for the once-a-month Nation job, his main outlet is through a syndicated distributor creators.com. They send his articles to the usual leftwing culprits (Truthout.org, etc.) but also to Chronicles, a magazine published by the Rockford Institute. This Rockford is not the Jim Rockford played by James Garner in the popular TV detective show of yore, but rather a paleoconservative think-tank that garnered Max Blumenthal’s attention recently:

Even though the Rockford Institute has been dubbed “xenophobic, racist, and nativist,” by its former New York branch director, Richard John Neuhaus;  even though Rockford’s current director, Thomas Fleming, is a leading anti-Semite and Holocaust revisionist; even though Rockford’s flagship publication, Chronicles, has served as a nest for white nationalists like Sam Francis; Cornyn — a moving force behind Republican immigration policy — accepted Rockford’s invitation to headline their conference.

One can only wonder if Cornyn had a chance to rub elbows with Alexander Cockburn at the event.

[Originally, this article stated that Cockburn's main outlet besides The Nation and Counterpunch was Chronicles. I have modified the article after receiving a clarification from him. I will say this, however. I would never allow anything with my name appear in a racist, xenophobic publication like Chronicles. There really is no excuse for that.]

The other journalist is a fellow named Marc Cooper, who arguably might be described as a retired journalist since nobody, including the Nation Magazine, appears interested in publishing him nowadays. A quarter-century ago Cooper was an estimable figure, writing a first-rate piece on Pinochet’s Chile if memory serves me right. I never would have dreamed that he would have evolved into the dyspeptic, Albert Shanker-like figure he is today. Keeping Woody Allen’s wisecrack from Sleeper in mind, let’s hope that Cooper never gets his hands on a nuclear weapon.

Turning to Cockburn’s article first, Autumn of the Driveler, we learn that he takes great exception to a couple of recent offenses by the retired head of state. The first of these is Castro’s joining ranks with the 9/11 “truthers”:

Castro claimed that the Pentagon was hit by a rocket, not a plane, because no traces were found of its passengers. “Only a projectile could have created the geometrically round orifice created by the alleged airplane,” according to Fidel. “We were deceived as well as the rest of the planet’s inhabitants.” All nonsense of course.

Cockburn links this conspiracism with a more recent offense by Castro, namely giving credence to a book about the role of the Bilderbergs:

The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an article on August 18, spread across three of the eight pages of the Communist Party newspaper Granma, quoting in extenso from the Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin’s ‘The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club,’ (2006) alleging the Bilderbergers control everything, which must mean that they pack a lot in to the three-day session the Club holds each year as its sole public activity. Of course they probably skype each other a lot too and rot out their brains plotting and planning on their cell phones.

It should be mentioned, by the way, that Castro’s age had been cited earlier in the article by Cockburn: “In both of these media Castro, now 84, has spouted a steady stream of drivel.” Now I would not want to advise such an acclaimed journalist to review an article he has written before publishing it, but it is probably not a good idea to make such a gaffe. It might give readers the impression that he is slipping—as they put it.

I should also add that Cockburn might want to tread a bit more lightly when it comes to conspiracy theory since his frequent contributions to the climate change debate amount to a conspiracy theory themself. He claims that scientists warning about climate change are basically part of a vast conspiracy by companies like General Electric who make things up in order to scare people into accepting nuclear power. Wow!

I was greatly amused by Cockburn’s discovery that “bits of Estulin’s book reverently quoted by Castro, who called Estulin honest and well informed, retread some of the doctrines of Lyndon LaRouche, one of the most lurid conspiracists in political history”. I guess that he must have forgotten that he has called upon Zbigniew Jaworowski, an expert in Larouche’s stable, to support his global warming denialism:

Alexander Cockburn in the 6/9/2007 Weekend edition of Counterpunch:

Take Warsaw-based Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, famous for his critiques of ice-core data. He’s devastating on the IPCC rallying cry that CO2 is higher now than it has ever been over the past 650,000 years. In his 1997 paper in the Spring 21st Century Science and Technology, he demolishes this proposition. In particular, he’s very good on pointing out the enormous inaccuracies in the ice-core data and the ease with which a CO2 reading from any given year is contaminated by the CO2 from entirely different eras. He also points out that from 1985 on there’s been some highly suspect editing of the CO2 data, presumably to reinforce the case for the “unprecedented levels” of modern CO2. In fact, in numerous papers prior to 1985, there were plenty of instances of CO2 levels much higher than current CO2 measurements, some even six times higher. He also points out that it is highly unscientific to merge ice-core temperature measurements with modern temperature measurements.

Cockburn failed to identify Jaworowski’s professional qualifications. He is in fact not a climatologist but a professor at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland. He also fails to identify 21st Century Science and Technology as a publication of Lyndon Larouche’s bizarre ultrarightist cult that used to beat leftists up in the 1970s, provided snitches on the antinuclear movement to the Reagan administration, received paramilitary training from a KKK leader, blamed modern day capitalist ills on the Jews and Queen Elizabeth, etc.

Turning from the ridiculous to the ridiculouser, Marc Cooper’s blog has been churning out diatribes against the Cuban government with more regularity than the Cuban American National Foundation.

Most recently, Cooper has written a self-congratulatory article about what he (and Jeffrey Goldberg) regards as the arrival of capitalism to Cuba. While it contains the usual vitriol directed against the Evil Dictator, it does mark something of a departure for Cooper in that it is framed in Marxist theory, something that by the evidence looks like what the journalist picked up in a freshman poli sci class rather than from any reading of Karl Marx.

He writes:

Marx saw “socialism” as an economic stage superior to capitalism. He didn’t mean morally superior. Marx meant that socialism, a society of equality, could ONLY be built upon a fully developed and mature, indeed over-ripe, global capitalist system.

This, of course, is the sort of thing that social democrats of the Kautskyite stripe have been arguing forever. One doubts that Cooper ever read Kautsky in the original but absorbed this Menshevik platitude from a copy of Dissent Magazine years ago.

One hardly knows how to break this to Cooper, but this was not Marx’s view at all. In the late 1870s, he developed a keen interest in the struggles against Czarism that he regarded as a possible springboard for a renewed assault against capitalist privilege across the European continent. He carried out a correspondence with populist leaders in Russia who understood Plekhanov’s writings to be a true interpretation of what Marx had been writing. Plekhanov, whose influence on Kautsky was profound, believed that it was a mistake to struggle for socialism in such a backward country. The best that could be hoped for was a deepening of capitalist relations that could prepare the way for socialism. This meant that it was necessary to give critical support to the capitalist destruction of the rural communes, a precapitalist social formation in the countryside that the populists wanted to defend.

In an 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx wrote:

At the same time as the commune is bled dry and tortured, its land rendered barren and poor, the literary lackeys of the “new pillars of society” ironically depict the wounds inflicted on it as so many symptoms of its spontaneous decrepitude. They allege that it is dying a natural death and they would be doing a good job by shortening its agony. As far as this is concerned, it is no longer a matter of solving a problem; it is simply a matter of beating an enemy. To save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is needed. For that matter, the government and the “new pillars of society” are doing their best to prepare the masses for just such a disaster. If revolution comes at the opportune moment, if it concentrates all its forces so as to allow the rural commune full scope, the latter will soon develop as an element of regeneration in Russian society and an element of superiority over the countries enslaved by the capitalist system.

In another letter to N.K. Mikhailovsky, the leading theorist of Russian Populism, Marx explicitly disavows himself from any kind of unilinear theory of history that would require societies to go through stages, like a larva turning into a butterfly. Referring to Capital, a work that supposedly gave its imprimatur to this kind of schematicism, Marx wrote:

In the chapter on primitive accumulation, my sole aim is to trace the path by which the capitalist economic order in western Europe emerged out of the womb of the feudal economic order. Hence it follows the movement which divorced the producer from his means of production, transforming the former into a wage-earner (a proletarian, in the modern sense of the word) and the latter into capital. In this history, “every revolution marks an era which serves as a lever in the advancement of the capitalist class in the process of its formation. But the basis of the evolution is the expropriation of the tiller of the soil”. At the end of the chapter, I deal with the historical tendency of accumulation and I assert that its last word is the transformation of capitalist property into social property. I supply no proof of this at that point for the good reason that this assertion itself is nothing but the succinct summary of prolonged developments previously presented in the chapters on capitalist production.

Now, what application to Russia could my critic draw from my historical outline? Only this: if Russia tries to become a capitalist nation, in imitation of the nations of western Europe, and in recent years she has taken a great deal of pains in this respect, she will not succeed without first having transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once brought into the lap of the capitalist regime, she will be subject to its inexorable laws, like other profane nations. That is all. But this is too much for my critic. He absolutely must needs metamorphose my outline of the genesis of capitalism in western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general course, fatally imposed upon all peoples, regardless of the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed, in order to arrive finally at that economic formation which insures with the greatest amount of productive power of social labor the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. He does me too much honor and too much shame at the same time. Let us take one example. In different passages of Capital, I have made allusion to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome.

Originally, they were free peasants tilling, every man for himself, their own piece of land. In the course of Roman history, they were expropriated. The same movement which separated them from their means of production and of subsistence, implied not only the formation of large landed properties but also the formation of large monetary capitals. Thus, one fine day, there were on the one hand free men stripped of everything save their labor power, and on the other, for exploiting this labor, the holders of all acquired wealth. What happened? The Roman proletarian became not a wage-earning worker, but an indolent mob, more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern lands of the United States; and by their side was unfolded not a capitalist but a slave mode of production. Hence, strikingly analogical events, occurring, however, in different historical environments, led to entirely dissimilar results.

By studying each of these evolutions separately, and then comparing them, one will easily find the key to these phenomena, but one will never succeed with the master-key of a historico-philosophical theory whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical.

Now, of course, the notion that it was a mistake to overthrow capitalism in Cuba or anywhere else for that matter until the capitalist system has “ripened” to the extent that it is safe to go on to the next stage of socialism is just a demonstration that some erstwhile radicals have gotten very cozy with their place in capitalist society. People like Christopher Hitchens and Marc Cooper enjoy the emoluments their capitalist employers hand out to them. From the heights of the posts they occupy as esteemed journalists and professors, they snarl at anybody who has the temerity to break with the system. The implication is that people in places like Haiti have to have the patience to endure capitalism for another century until things get rotten-ripe enough for them to rise up against the system.

Until now, and arguably for the foreseeable future, socialist Cuba will be a beacon to all those fighting for a better world, as the differences between capitalist Haiti and socialist Cuba make clear. Here is what Paul Farmer had to say on the subject in a July 10, 2000 New Yorker Magazine profile:

Leaving Haiti, Farmer didn’t stare down through the airplane window at that brown and barren third of an island. “It bothers me even to look at it,” he explained, glancing out. “It can’t support eight million people, and there they are. There they are, kidnapped from West Africa.”

But when we descended toward Havana he gazed out the window intently, making exclamations: “Only ninety miles from Haiti, and look! Trees! Crops! It’s all so verdant. At the height of the dry season! The same ecology as Haiti’s, and look!”

An American who finds anything good to say about Cuba under Castro runs the risk of being labelled a Communist stooge, and Farmer is fond of Cuba. But not for ideological reasons. He says he distrusts all ideologies, including his own. “It’s an ‘ology,’ after all,” he wrote to me once, about liberation theology. “And all ologies fail us at some point.” Cuba was a great relief to me. Paved roads and old American cars, instead of litters on the gwo wout ia. Cuba had food rationing and allotments of coffee adulterated with ground peas, but no starvation, no enforced malnutrition. I noticed groups of prostitutes on one main road, and housing projects in need of repair and paint, like most buildings in the city. But I still had in mind the howling slums of Port-au-Prince, and Cuba looked lovely to me. What looked loveliest to Farmer was its public-health statistics.

Many things affect a public’s health, of course-nutrition and transportation, crime and housing, pest control and sanitation, as well as medicine. In Cuba, life expectancies are among the highest in the world. Diseases endemic to Haiti, such as malaria, dengue fever, t.b., and AIDS, are rare. Cuba was training medical students gratis from all over Latin America, and exporting doctors gratis- nearly a thousand to Haiti, two en route just now to Zanmi Lasante. In the midst of the hard times that came when the Soviet Union dissolved, the government actually increased its spending on health care. By American standards, Cuban doctors lack equipment, and are very poorly paid, but they are generally well trained. At the moment, Cuba has more doctors per capita than any other country in the world-more than twice as many as the United States. “I can sleep here,” Farmer said when we got to our hotel. “Everyone here has a doctor.”

Farmer gave two talks at the conference, one on Haiti, the other on “the noxious synergy” between H.I.V. and t.b.-an active case of one often makes a latent case of the other active, too. He worked on a grant proposal to get anti-retroviral medicines for Cange, and at the conference met a woman who could help. She was in charge of the United Nations’ project on AIDS in the Caribbean. He lobbied her over several days. Finally, she said, “O.K., let’s make it happen.” (“Can I give you a kiss?” Farmer asked. “Can I give you two?”) And an old friend, Dr. Jorge Perez, arranged a private meeting between Farmer and the Secretary of Cuba’s Council of State, Dr. José Miyar Barruecos. Farmer asked him if he could send two youths from Cange to Cuban medical school. “Of course,” the Secretary replied.

Again and again during our stay, Farmer marvelled at the warmth with which the Cubans received him. What did I think accounted for this?

I said I imagined they liked his connection to Harvard, his published attacks on American foreign policy in Latin America, his admiration of Cuban medicine.

I looked up and found his pale-blue eyes fixed on me. “I think it’s because of Haiti,” he declared. “I think it’s because I serve the poor.”

The USSR, Mustafa Kemal and “reactionary anti-imperialism”, part 2

Lazaro Cardenas: the Mexican Kemal

Perhaps no other incident in history better illustrates the old cliché that politics makes strange bedfellows than the Soviet-Turkish ties in the early 1920s.

This relationship had two phases. In the first that occurred during War Communism, the USSR made common cause with Turkey because they both were anxious to fend off British imperialism. 40,000 British troops were part of a 13 nation expeditionary force that was determined to overthrow Bolshevism.

Meanwhile, Britain used Greece as a surrogate invading power to control what would become Turkey in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Mustafa Kemal relied heavily on Soviet arms and material during 1920.

Within a couple of years, the policy of War Communism had been abandoned in favor of the NEP. This meant that the Soviet Union would put a high priority on establishing peaceful relationships with any and all countries, including Britain. This was also the period in which the Comintern looked Eastward in the hope that Asia would rise up against imperialism. It viewed national liberation movements as progressive, even when they were led by someone like Mustafa Kemal. Given this turn, it would make sense that the USSR would bend over backwards trying to link up with Turkey.

The definitive statement on Soviet-Turkish relations came from Karl Radek, whose articles England and the East and The Winding-Up of the Versailles Treaty, a report to the fourth Comintern congress are must reading. It is a shame that Goldner made no attempt to evaluate such material since it would at least have given the reader the assurance that he was considering all sides of the debate. In the second article, Radek zeroed in on the Treaty of Sevres that put the WWI victors in charge of the Ottoman finances and extracted other concessions. It was analogous to the Brest-Litovsk treaty that punished the infant Soviet Republic for having the temerity to withdraw from the WWI bloodbath. Radek wrote:

Whatever may be the result of the Near Eastern crisis, one thing is quite patent: the Sevres Treaty has been smashed by Turkish cannon. The popular masses of the Near East, who in the eyes of the Allies are not only a quantité négligeable, but simply the scum of the earth, have been set in motion against no less a thing than the Versailles Treaty. They are at present beginning to play their part. Among the diplomats who think to be able to control the course of history through clever formulae and secret conferences, there is disunity. Great Britain has experienced one of her deepest humiliations in her long history, when after the defeat of her Greek vassal, she durst not come in shining armour to his assistance, and after having pronounced a sentence of death upon Turkey, had now to flatter her and even to offer her a place in the League of Nations. This fact is the irrefutable proof of the break-up of the Sevres Treaty. Popular masses on a low level of civilisation can only be kept in subjection as long as there is unity among the slaveholders, but not when these come to loggerheads. As soon as the slaves perceive that the oppressors are trembling, they begin to rebel. The East of to-day which sees Great Britain trembling, is no more the East of the days of the Sevres Treaty. The Turkish victory finds an echo in India and the whole Islamic world. This echo is the best proof that we have to do with an important episode in the growth of the world revolution, with a success of the world revolution, though the organisers of the victory are far from being revolutionary in the modern sense of the term.

What is missing entirely from Goldner’s analysis is any sense of how important Kemal’s victory was in pushing Greece and Britain out of Turkish lands. This was not only important for the defense of the USSR, it was also a genuine anti-imperialist victory on a par with Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal or the British being forced to leave India. It does not matter that Nasser or Gandhi were bourgeois nationalists simply interested in capitalist development. Marxists, at least those not addled by philosophical idealism, have always considered colonial struggles as worthy of support even if they are not being led by communists.

In 1882, Engels wrote a letter to Karl Kautsky that was very much in the spirit of what Radek wrote. You will notice that he does not make communism some kind of litmus test. He is for the independence of oppressed nations even under bourgeois leadership:

One of the real tasks of the 1848 Revolution (and the real, not illusory tasks of a revolution are always solved as a result of that revolution) was the restoration of the oppressed and dispersed nationalities of Central Europe, insofar as these were at all viable and, especially, ripe for independence. This task was solved for Italy, Hungary and Germany, according to the then prevailing conditions, by the executors of the revolution’s will, Bonaparte, Cavour and Bismarck. Ireland and Poland remained. Ireland can be disregarded here, she affects the conditions of the Continent only very indirectly. But Poland lies in the middle of the Continent and the conservation of her division is precisely the link that has constantly held the Holy Alliance together, and therefore, Poland is of great interest to us….

I therefore hold the view that two nations in Europe have not only the right but even the duty to be nationalistic before they become internationalistic: the Irish and the Poles. They are most internationalistic when they are genuinely nationalistic. The Poles understood this during all crises and have proved it on all the battlefields of the revolution. Deprive them of the prospect of restoring Poland or convince them that the new Poland will soon drop into their lap by herself, and it is all over with their interest in the European revolution.

Maybe Goldner does not consider Engels to be a real communist, only one of those people promoting “reactionary anti-imperialism” but Engels is good enough for me.

All that being said, the question remains: was the USSR correct to try to maintain a close relationship with Turkey after Kemal unleashed his repression against the Communists? In some ways, this is a difficult question to answer since time was drawing near when it would become moot. By 1923, when Kemal was mopping up the Communists, the USSR was on the verge of isolating Leon Trotsky and other critical-minded Marxists who objected to what was becoming a policy of accommodation to the national bourgeoisie. In four short years, the disastrous policy in China would unfold prompting Trotsky to open a full-scale assault on Stalin’s class collaborationist politics. Under directions from Stalin, the Chinese CP had subordinated itself completely to the Kuomintang, leading to the slaughter of far more many working class militants than was the case in Turkey.

If the USSR was no longer able to serve as an example of how a revolutionary society relates to governments such as Kemal’s, there is one that is close at hand facing almost identical paradoxes and contradictions, namely Cuba. As I have already pointed out, Goldner is completely hostile to the Cuban government, linking it with North Korea in one of his articles:

Fewer still look to surviving relics such as North Korea or Cuba. The most radical elements of the 1960’s and 1970’s upsurge, from Socialism or Barbarism in France, Eastern European “Marxist humanism” (Kolakowski, the Yugoslav Praxis group), the Situationists, or the Italian workerists mainly rejected these regimes as viscerally as they rejected the (Keynesian) Labour and Social Democratic welfare states of the 1945-1975 period.

If they were the most radical elements of the 60s and 70s, I am glad that I went my own way. Frankly, there was about as much chance of me hooking up with the Situationists as there was with the yippies. I don’t begrudge someone like Guy Debord having a grand old time at the expense of middle-class propriety but I was far more interested in organizing mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

Now Cuba faces many of the same problems as the infant Soviet republic but with the added complication of having a much smaller resource base, a narrower geographical space that is additionally vulnerable due to its proximity to the USA, and—more recently—without socialist allies internationally.

Cuba faced a similar quandary in 1968 when the Mexican government unleashed a terrible repression against the student movement, many of whose leaders were likely Fidelistas politically. Although this is not quite the same situation as took place in Turkey in the 1920s, the Cuban government was as low-key as the Soviets were when the 15 Turkish Communists were drowned.

As I have pointed out myself to uncritical Fidelistas on Marxmail, there was no response from the Cuban government. If you go to the Castro speech database and do a search on Mexico during 1968, you will not find a word of protest.

Now it is no accident that Turkey and Mexico are connected in this fashion since both exemplify the paradoxes of national liberation movements led by the bourgeoisie and governments that have become calcified after it takes power. The Mexican PRI and Kemal’s Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican Peoples Party) were both political leaderships of arguably the last hurrah of the bourgeois revolution.

And, interestingly enough, both republics gave asylum to Leon Trotsky. For all of Mustafa Kemal’s hostility to Communism, he was willing to host Trotsky in the first leg of his exile. While Trotsky does not exactly sing Kemal’s praises in “My Life”, there are some accounts that he enjoyed his stay in Turkey immensely on a personal level. I recommend the documentary Exile in Buyukuda for the modern Turkish take on his stay in their homeland.

Despite Mexico’s more democratic functioning during Trotsky’s stay there, not much differentiated it from Turkey in economic terms. Both Kemal and Cardenas were committed to national development and considered labor and capital to be co-equal partners in a bid to modernize the respective countries. Of course, this was just propaganda. The way it worked out in practice, as it does everywhere in the world, is to the benefit of the bourgeoisie. In both the case of Turkey and Mexico, the lip-service paid to labor and the actual benefits it received declined the longer the two hegemonic bourgeois parties remained in the driver’s seat.

No matter how degraded the Mexican PRI had become, there was still a residual spark that motivated it to stand up to imperialism when it came to Castro’s Cuba. In a paper titled Capitalizing on Castro: Mexico’s Foreign Relations with Cuba, 1959-1969, Renata Keller makes clear how important Mexico was to Cuba. The article begins:

In the decade immediately following Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, Mexican leaders consistently distinguished themselves from their Latin American counterparts by acting as outspoken defenders of the Cuban people’s right to self-determination. Influential politicians such as Lázaro Cárdenas threw their support behind Castro, and in 1960 Mexican president Adolfo López Mateos welcomed Cuban president Osvaldo Dorticós in a lavish state visit. At the July 1964 meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, D.C., Mexico was the only Latin American country that refused to adopt the resolution to break diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba and impose economic sanctions. Mexico thereafter maintained diplomatic relations with Cuba, which effectively established Mexico as the sole link between Castro and the rest of the hemisphere because none of the other Latin American governments recognized Cuba’s revolutionary regime until after 1970.

So in order to fend off American economic pressure and to find an ally, sincere or not, in diplomatic initiatives against the counter-revolutionary OAS, Cuba found itself in bed with Mexico.

While it is difficult to quantify what this relationship meant to Cuba, it very likely helped Fidel Castro to survive. No matter how politically bankrupt Mexico and the USSR were, they were necessary allies against imperialism. If Castro refused to denounce Mexico in 1968 or the USSR for invading Czechoslovakia in the same year, he more than made up for this in assisting liberation movements in Africa and Latin America.

In the real world, politics can be very messy. My advice to my anarchist, situationist, left, council and libertarian communist friends who want to keep their hands clean is to stay out of politics altogether.

Zizek embarrassments

I am not sure that Slavoj Zizek has the same cachet with Marxist graduate students he had about 10 years ago, but in case there are some readers of the unrepentant Marxist who fall into that category, let me draw your attention to two items—one about Cuba and the other about Avatar—that might give you pause for thought. Although I no longer have the kind of visceral dislike for his ideas and personality I once did, every once in a while he can really get my dander up.

A couple of weeks ago Derrick O’Keefe sent me a link to a Youtube clip  of Zizek speaking on “The Future of Europe” at a conference in Slovenia. Someone must have asked him about Cuba during the Q&A since his potshots  seem to have little to do with the topic at hand unless he was trying to warn the audience about the dangers of “stagnation” and “gulags” that might attend a Cuban-style revolution in Europe.

It appears that our Lacanian theorist took a trip to Cuba a while back and didn’t like what he saw very much, to put it mildly. He was struck by all the “poverty”, “stagnation” and “inefficiency” that he interpreted as the Cuban leadership’s attempt to prove its “authenticity”. No, I am not making this up. Just watch the Youtube clip and see for yourself. As a professional psychoanalyst, as Zizek described himself, the only explanation for this kind of “renunciation” was a kind of self-destructive mental illness. For Zizek, the effects of an American embargo and the need to spend a disproportionate amount of the national treasury on weaponry becomes a form of anorexia, as if Fidel Castro viewed consumer goods and creature comfort as “bourgeois”.

Zizek also urges those in his audience to see the “gulags” in Cuba. I am not sure whether the psychoanalyst, film critic and fan of Lenin has read much about Cuba, but the island has been invaded by an expeditionary force organized by the USA and suffered billions of dollars of war damages during Operation Mongoose. It has also had to put up with a domestic opposition financed by the USA ever since the revolutionaries took power. Any other country that had to face such mortal threats would have been far more repressive than Cuba, including the USA which put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during WWII simply for being Japanese.

Out of curiosity, I did a search on “Zizek and Cuba” in google/books and came up with a  reference that helped put his Youtube utterances into perspective. In “Welcome to the desert of the Real”, a group of essays meditating on 9/11, Zizek describes a “paradox” in which the main result of the revolution is “to bring social dynamics to a standstill”. If you’re a bit puzzled about what exactly this standstill involves, he would tell you that it is the “1950s American cars” you see everywhere. Someone with the barest curiosity about Cuba might know that the island places much more emphasis on other forms of “social dynamics” than automobiles, including a biotechnology industry second to none:

Cuba’s biotechnological capacity places it in group four of the World Health Organization’s five categories. To reach group five, which is formed only by the eight top industrial economies, Cuba must produce at least 20% of the 260 basic materials. It regularly produces 18% of these and certainly has the scientific ability to produce the others with biotech methods.

Cuba also has 160 distinct research and development units and over 10,000 researchers through out the country

According to Cuba’s own figures, as well as those provided by scientists and engineers, both from Cuba and other countries, the Cuban government has spent approximately $3,500 million dollars in this industry since 1986. The return of such investment has been approximately the sales of $200 million dollars in vaccines and medicines. The production for domestic use has been almost nothing, since the Cuban people lack the most basic medicines. [LP: An assertion that unlike those made previously is not backed by data. The fact is that Cuba's infant mortality rate and average life expectancy match those of Canada. If it lacked "the most basic medicines", this could not be possible. In any case, the hostility toward Cuba expressed by this assertion, if anything, would add weight to the previous comments about biotechnology.]

Unlike the Lacanian, Cuba seems to have its priorities straight.

Turning now to his review of Avatar, it must be said that his leftist attack on the movie that appeared in the New Statesman is familiar by now, coming rather late in the game, and with the by-now obligatory mention of Dances with Wolves:

The utopia imagined in Avatar follows the Hollywood formula for producing a couple – the long tradition of a resigned white hero who has to go among the savages to find a proper sexual partner (just recall Dances With Wolves)…

Avatar’s fidelity to the old formula of creating a couple, its full trust in fantasy, and its story of a white man marrying the aboriginal princess and becoming king, make it ideologically a rather conservative, old-fashioned film. Its technical brilliance serves to cover up this basic conservatism. It is easy to discover, beneath the politically correct themes (an honest white guy siding with ecologically sound aborigines against the “military-industrial complex” of the imperialist invaders), an array of brutal racist motifs: a paraplegic outcast from earth is good enough to get the hand of a beautiful local princess, and to help the natives win the decisive battle. The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man’s fantasy.

Oddly enough, this analysis was embraced by David Brooks of the NY Times, an op-ed columnist with a long history in the neoconservative movement:

Still, would it be totally annoying to point out that the whole White Messiah fable, especially as Cameron applies it, is kind of offensive?

It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.

Zizek scolds Cameron for not having made a movie that the indigenous peoples of Orissa could relate to. These are the Indian poor who are being displaced by mining companies that Sanhati activist Siddhartha Mitra reported on at last week’s Left Forum.  Zizek writes:

So where is Cameron’s film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists. The true avatar is thus Avatar itself – the film substituting for reality.

Despite Zizek’s animosity, there is evidence that the super-exploited do connect to the movie.

Ironically, the Chinese workers and peasants who are being robbed of the social gains of the Maoist revolution that these very Naxalites identify with do feel a connection as the Christian Science Monitor reported:

The plot of “Avatar,” on the other hand, could be seen to parallel all sorts of contemporary Chinese problems. The tale of a people threatened with eviction by outsiders in search of minerals could, for example, be thought to echo the plight of the Tibetans.

But the similarity that resonates with ordinary Chinese is between the invaders’ rapacious attack on the Na’vis in “Avatar” and greedy property developers’ routine evictions of householders and farmers in China to make way for new buildings.

Such evictions are the most common cause of violent disturbances in China, according to official statistics.

“Avatar is a successful model in … fighting against violent demolition and we can learn from it in both the strategies and tactics,” wrote one blogger.

Some protesters have already used the movie to draw attention to their plight. One blog carried a photo of a building under construction in the southern province of Guangdong draped with banners proclaiming, “We are innocent Na’vis on the planet Pandora” and “The Avatar reality show is on.”

Meanwhile Evo Morales, a leader of indigenous peoples in Bolivia who became president on a leftwing program, relates to Cameron’s “racist” movie as well:

“LA PAZ, Bolivia — Bolivia’s first indigenous president is praising “Avatar” for what he calls its message of saving the environment from exploitation.

A self-proclaimed socialist, Evo Morales says he identifies with the film’s “profound show of resistance to capitalism and the struggle for the defence of nature.”

Finally, the Palestinians have found the movie’s message and imagery relevant enough to appropriate for a novel demonstration:

Samuel Farber’s latest folly

Samuel Farber

The latest issue of Against the Current (http://www.solidarity-us.org/atc/current) has a colloquium on Cuba occasioned by the 50^th anniversary of the revolution. As might be expected, they have an offering from Sam Farber who is on the editorial board and a self-styled Cubanologist. Farber has been a frequent contributor to ATC and to ISO journals, as well as the author of a couple of books on Cuba. In my opinion, his ideologically-loaded agenda and scholarly lapses tarnish the reputation of any journal that publishes him, but after all we are living in a free country.

His latest article titled “Political Controls from Above” (http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2274) incorporates all his crappy tendencies and unfortunately requires me to take time from my busy schedule to rebut.

About half of the article is devoted to complaints about Cuban cultural practices, including the banning of the Beatles music in the 1960s. This is blamed on Stalinism but a more accurate analysis would base itself on trying to understand Cuban society in terms of a country trying to define itself culturally after so many years of colonialism. In the Soviet Union in the 1920s the government promoted art that reflected the revolutionary zeitgeist. Soviet art academies probably did not foster the development of figurative art that would have been considered decadent. That is what happens in revolutions. They are subject to excess, including on the cultural front.

However, in the 1930s Soviet culture was heavily controlled by Stalin who had the final word on what went into a movie. Some of the great experimental artists of the 1920s no longer were able to work after socialist realism became imposed on the country. Nothing like this happened in Cuba on the scale indicated by Farber. For a more nuanced take on Cuban excesses in this period, I can recommend Nelson Valdes’s article “Cuba, the Beatles and Historical Context“. He writes:

The escalation of the war in Vietnam (1965), the rift between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (1963-1966) did not leave much room for music appreciation with help from Liverpool. Moreover, American teenagers were becoming a mass market for “I Saw Her Standing There” while in Havana people discussed how to take a country out of underdevelopment. Then there was also the problem of defeating 600 guerrilla groups armed by the Central Intelligence Agency and operating in the Escambray Mountains. In New York DJs spoke of “Golden Hits” but in the Dominican Republic US Marines were landing and hitting towns with their overwhelming fire power. And the US air force had just begun bombing North Vietnam.

Cubans were baffled when the Queen of England appointed the Beatles “Members of the Order of the British Empire” circa June 1965; by then Che had begun the efforts to spark continental revolutions in Africa and Latin America began to confront a wave of military coup d’etats.

In those days, the Americans certainly could not lecture the Cubans about matters of music appreciation. When the Beatles finally began to address the necessity of giving “peace a chance” [a Plastic One Band project] and even criticized US policy in Southeast Asia, criticism of them began in the United States. When Lennon made the passing remark that they were more popular than Jesus, the Bible belt reacted. Radio stations classified the Beatles as anti-American and a boycott ensued. The Beatles had to choose between sales and political convictions. They ended up apologizing for their views on politics and religion to the American rightwing. The Cubans found the whole matter disconcerting.

Granted, by 1966, the Beatles had turned against US interventionism. The Beatles were not a phenomenon that had a popular impact on Cuba, then. Yet, Silvio Rodríguez in the late 1960s had a TV program called ‘Mientras Tanto’ where he actually defended the Beatles’ music and songs. Silvio was criticized and lost his TV spot.

The Beatles’ transcendentalism and Eastern mysticism (circa 1968) alienated Cuban radicals and revolutionaries as well. However, Cuban musicians were impressed by their freedom of composition. But in those days, Cubans had more serious concerns than imagining a yellow submarine when the real ones were just 12 miles away, and the only “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” they knew were the U-2s and Blackbirds that entered their air space in order to clock the Cuban Air command and control structures.

Whatever excesses existed 40 years ago, nobody can accuse Cuban culture of being regimented. The Beatles have been given their place in history and Cuban movies are often cutting edge critiques of government insensitivity. The problem with Farber is that this world is of little interest to him. He is much happier mining ancient Cuban history for blemishes that support his ideological agenda, which can best be described as socialist utopianism. This is not utopian socialism but a belief based on the idea that the obligation of socialists is to conceive of a kind of ideal world that by ritual incantation in the pages of magazines can somehow be realized by divine inspiration.

Farber is past master at making such allegations that later turn out to be unfounded. In 2003, he gave an interview to New Politics in which he made the startling revelation that Cuban dissidents were being put in mental hospitals, just like in the USSR. After doing some research on this question, I discovered that the sole reference to such a thing in Lexis-Nexis was to a Milagro Cruz Cano who had indeed spent some time in a psychiatric hospital.

It turns out that Cano was a guitar-playing religious zealot who hooked up with the Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez after leaving Cuba. The first article that turned up in Lexis-Nexis hardly reveals her as a fighter for democracy:

Milagro Cruz Cano a blind worshipper who plays her guitar outside tourist hotels, said her instrument had been taken away by police. Last Saturday, she said, someone with an authoritative voice approached her outside a hotel and said, “Enjoy this until the pope goes, because we’ll take it out on you after he leaves.”

(USA Today, January 26, 1998)

I don’t know how quite to put this, but playing a guitar in front of tourist hotels is not quite the sort of thing that got Grigorenko tossed into a psychiatric hospital.

Another article was hardly likely to make this case either:

A few blocks from where the cameras wait and the people chant, Milagros Cruz Cano, a blind 32-year-old exile, has been living in a tent on the street, existing on Gatorade and water.

Until the moment she was finally banished from Cuba 10 months ago, she believed her daughter, who is now 9 years old, would be allowed to come with her.

“When I told my daughter that they allowed me to take my two dogs, but not her,” Milagros explained through a translator, my daughter, she say, “Mama, put me in the cage and dress me as a dog, so I can be with you. Please, Mama, do not leave me.”

(The Boston Herald April 6, 2000)

But if you go to the Amnesty International website and enter “Cuba” and “psychiatric” in their search field, you will find nothing except a reference to the unfortunate Ms. Milagros.

One of the most telling allegations was about the Cuban Stalinist Anibal Escalante who Farber describes as being victimized solely over his critique of Cuban economic policy:

Among countless repressive incidents of that period was the purge, for the second time, of the old Stalinist Aníbal Escalante who was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1968 for organizing what was really a discussion group. His so-called “microfaction” had been meeting to analyze the shortcomings of the Cuban economy from an orthodox Soviet perspective and was friendly with a number of Soviet block diplomats.

Now this is ancient history but it is worth reviewing. Farber’s reference to Escalante being “friendly with a number of Soviet block diplomats” does not even scratch the surface.

Perhaps the most authoritative study of Castro’s Cuba is Tad Szulc’s “Fidel: a critical portrait”, a 685 page work with 13 pages worth of footnotes by the liberal NY Times reporter. In 1985 Szulc interviewed Fabio Grobart, the head of the Historical Institute of the Marxist-Leninist Institute in Cuba, and found his account of the Escalante affair credible.

Grobart stated that the Escalante group operated as a faction hostile to the Cuban government and sought to ingratiate himself to the Kremlin in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. This was a period in which Cuba was poised to break openly with the USSR. Castro, while endorsing the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, had offered a critique of the Soviet bureaucracy that could have been written by a Trotskyist. He had also issued a strong condemnation of pro-Soviet parties in Latin America that had opposed the rural guerrilla warfare orientation. So sharp were the differences that Cuba had refused to send a delegation to a conference in Bucharest in 1968 convened to deal with the Sino-Soviet split, something that Szulc regarded as a “slap in the face to the Soviets”. This led to strained economic relations between the two countries in which there was a substantial drop in trade. On February 2^nd 1968 Granma announced that “no one can call us a satellite state and that is the reason we are respected in the world.” For its part Pravda responded by denouncing “reactionaries who follow the writings of men who call for revolutionary changes in the entire social system”, a clear rebuke to Fidel Castro.

None of this is acknowledged in Samuel Farber’s highly selective reading of Cuban history. But perhaps more to the point it demonstrates once again that Farber has a soft spot in his heart for Cuban Stalinism, something that seems to have eluded his “socialism from below” friends in Solidarity and the ISO. In the Vol. 18, No. 1 1983 edition of Latin American Research Review, Farber has an article titled “The Cuban Communists in the Early Stages of the Cuban Revolution: Revolutionaries or Reformists?” that is positively glowing over the CP, especially in comparison to the Castroites:

Last but not least, the PSP [Popular Socialist Party, the pro-Kremlin official party] was the only significant political force in Cuba that claimed to be socialist or Marxist and therefore stressed the importance of a systematic ideology and program for the development of strategy and tactics. Its ideology and program were tools used to win ideological support from radicalized Cubans seeking a systematic explanation of the country’s situation. This aspect of the PSP is even more noticeable when contrasted to the antitheoretical and antiprogrammatic stance of the Twenty-sixth-of-July movement.

While I can understand why some people can go positively weak in the knees over being in the presence of groups that “stress a systematic ideology”, I for one am more inclined to agree with Karl Marx who told Bracke that “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.” I think that is doubly true when it comes to the activity of the PSP.

During the 1930s the PSP supported Fulgencio Batista about whom secretary-general Blas Roca said “When Batista found the path to democracy, the party helped him.” Batista returned the favor and enjoyed a close relationship to the party. Two Communists became part of Batista’s cabinet in 1942. This was all part of the Popular Front strategy that we assumed people like Samuel Farber would have a dim view of. Or maybe dimwitted…

Batista left office in 1944 but returned as a dictator in 1952. While opposing the takeover, the PSP continued to operate as a reform-oriented housebroken opposition party. It reserved most of its zeal to be used against the youthful guerrillas led by Fidel Castro who were described as “putschists” after the 1953 attack on the Moncada.

Finally, just a word about Farber’s defense of the 75 “dissidents” who were found guilty of being on the American payroll:

Moreover, this situation should not be judged in isolation from the overall context of the Cuban state monopolizing the means of publication and broadcasting. In addition to lacking any legitimate avenue to express their ideas, dissidents are routinely denied educational opportunities and fired from their state jobs, which constitute the great majority of available jobs in Cuba. This situation will lead many of them to the unfortunate conclusion that the enemy of their enemy is their friend, if not to become outright supporters of the United States, and thus make them willing to receive financial aid from the U.S. government.

I find this line of reasoning to be disingenuous in the extreme. People in Cuba come to the American consulate in Cuba not because it is their last resort but because they have given up on Cuba. Try to put yourself in a Cuban’s shoes. The United States has invaded your country, forced dictators on it, likely used chemical and biological weapons, bombed movie theaters, blown up civilian airliners, and made repeated assassination attempts on your president. I would as soon go to the American consulate as voted for Bush in the last election. Samuel Farber, who was born in Cuba himself, seems to have allowed his enmity for Fidel Castro to override all objectivity. I can understand why somebody with such a background would end up this way, but it is incomprehensible to me why the people at Against the Current and the ISO would continue to treat him as an unbiased source. Very regrettable indeed.

Sam Farber, the ISO, and the Angolan Revolution

Nito Alves: the Bernard Coard of Angola

In the 1950s Tony Cliff developed an analysis of the USSR and the satellite states that while theoretically flawed at least had the merit of being engaged with a palpable reality, namely that Stalinism violated everything that socialists believed in. It was such an evil system that they applied a term to it that was intended to convey the ultimate form of opprobrium in our lexicon. It was “state capitalist”. By calling these countries “capitalist”-after a fashion-you draw a clear class line, whether or not of course it corresponds to reality.

Since Marx described capitalism as a social system that revolved around profit (“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets”), it was rather hard to describe the plodding Soviet system that was by all evidence indifferent to profits in those terms. Leaving aside this key distinction, the main merit of the state capitalist ideology is that it allowed its defenders to feel superior to their Stalinist enemies and the old-school Trotskyists who still insisted that the USSR rested on collectivized property relations.

When the Cuban revolution took place, the state capitalists were thrown a curve. Since socialism could only be carried out from “below” by parties that had mastered the profundities of state capitalist theory, they had to make Cuba look as much as possible like the USSR. Workers had to be seen as being trampled underfoot inside Cuba and the foreign policy of the Cuban government had to be based on the same kind of narrow, nationalistic interests that guided the Kremlin. To shoehorn Cuban reality into a state capitalist schema required careful selection of facts that help to support the foregone conclusion. While historical materialism is understood by its practitioners as a method that bases itself on a scrupulous examination of social reality, its state capitalist adherents are not above changing the rules when it comes to something like the Cuban revolution which undermines their own, self-privileged “vanguard” status.

Of particular use to the state capitalists have been the books and articles of Sam Farber, a Cuban-American professor whose articles have appeared with some regularity in the International Socialist Organization’s press. The U.S.-based ISO is one of the more important state capitalist groups but has no connection to the equally important British SWP which expelled it from their international movement about a decade ago. I have quite a bit of respect for the ISO, particularly their work in the Green Party in years past, but find their reliance on Sam Farber to be most regrettable.

Despite (or perhaps because of) his academic credentials, Farber is not above making things up to support his judgments against Cuba. For example, in an interview with the Shachtmanite New Politics (a magazine with some affinity for the state capitalists politically, but differing on the exact class character of the former Soviet Union), Farber claimed that Cuba-just like the USSR-put political opponents in mental hospitals. There was only problem with this allegation. It was false as I demonstrated in a rebuttal written in September 2003.

Farber seems to be at it again. In an article titled “Contradictions of Cuba’s foreign policy” that appears in the ISO newspaper and that was originally published in Le Monde Diplomatique, Farber makes the case that Cuban foreign policy is self-serving even if most people on the left regard it as revolutionary internationalism of the highest order.

While Farber is on relatively solid footing by criticizing Castro’s support for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (of course leaving out the trenchant attack on Soviet bureaucracy that Castro’s speech was laced with), most of the focus is on Cuban involvement in Africa which Farber gives some grudging support to:

In the case of Angola, Cuba’s strategy, along with its alliance with the Soviet empire, allowed Cuba to play a very important role in the defense of that country against Western imperialism and its right-wing UNITA agents. Cuba delivered a heavy military and political blow against South African apartheid, which supported UNITA.

But as is typical of this “One hand giveth, the other taketh away” article, Farber applies a debit to this credit, hence yielding a zero balance in the Cuban account:

However, Cuban aid was not free of cost to the Angolan people. Thus, for example, Cuban troops actively intervened in internal disputes within the Angolan MPLA, like when they insured the victory of the faction led by Agostino Neto against the faction led by Nito Alves.

Now if were an editor at the ISO newspaper, I would have written Farber immediately after he submitted the article raising this question: “Sam, our readers might not know who Neto and Alves were. Could you expand on this since it seems crucial to your argument?” Alas, they never would have bothered since they have a stake in the ideological outcome of Farber’s article. At all costs, it is necessary to paint Cuban troops as bureaucratic meddlers even if it is not exactly clear what they did. Just say the words “actively intervened in internal disputes” and the damage is done. These words summon up images of the Kremlin engineering the ouster of Earl Browder, etc. and help to place the Cuban government beyond the pale of “socialism from below” principles.

Although I would like to dissect Farber’s entire article, space limitations force me to address the Neto-Alves dispute since Farber’s bad faith reference to it will hopefully alert the reader to take the rest of the article with a grain of salt.

You can read about the Neto-Alves conflict in Paul Fauvet’s article “The Rise and Fall of Nito Alves” that appeared in the May-August 1977 issue of “Review of African Political Economy” (contact me for a copy).

Nito Alves can best be described as an aspiring Bernard Coard for those who are familiar with the sad events in Grenada. Nito Alves was a leader of the MPLA who led a guerrilla unit in the Dembo forests that was cut off from the rest of the MPLA during intense fighting with Holden Roberto’s FNLA. Just around the time that the MPLA was poised to take power, Alves returned to Luanda and assumed leadership of the clandestine groups in the local prisons. It was also around the time that Alves began to demonstrate ultraleft and narrow nationalist tendencies that would put him on a collision course with other MPLA leaders.

For example, he developed a theory that equated the Angolan bourgeoisie as those of white and mixed ancestry, regardless of their relationship to the means of production. He proposed that whites should be stripped of their citizenship unless they had actively participated in the liberation movement. Mesticos (mixed ancestry) would have to apply for citizenship as well. This flew in the face of MPLA traditions in which the anti-imperialist struggle was based not on ethnic but on class divisions.

Despite his shaky theories, Alves’s work in the mass movement catapulted him into the post of Interior Minister. Colleagues and friends of Alves began to notice a megalomaniac streak that was only enhanced by his new duties. He was heard to say “history has reserved for me the heavy task of leading the working class to power.” In a brochure of military texts by Lenin edited by Alves, he included a reference to “the immortal Lenin, whose work I intend to continue.”

As Minister of the Interior, Alves wasted no time placing his co-thinkers in powerful positions in the new Angolan state. He was also in charge of the Luanda CPB’s (Popular Bairro Committees) that were modeled on the Cuban Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. Meanwhile, Afonso “MBinda” Van-Dunem, one of Alves’s closest associates, used his position in the Angolan army to promote Alves supporters.

Besides the CPB’s and the army, the nitistas (as the followers of Nito Alves were called) had a base in the Ministry of Internal Trade where corruption was rampant. They began stockholding food as part of a plan to buy the support of the masses. In exchange for their loyalty, they would get something to eat.

Concern about nitista factionalism finally led to a decision at an October 1976 MPLA central committee meeting to abolish the Ministry of the Interior. Alves and his allies, including Van Dunem, remained on the central committee but were given notice that they would no longer be able to promote their faction against the interests of the Angolan revolution as a whole.

This led the nitistas to accelerate their plans to overthrow the MPLA through a coup d’etat. They planned to kill or exile President Agostino Neto and liquidate a number of top MPLA and government officials, all in the name of “preserving the Angolan revolution”. In the spring of 1976, there were ominous signs of the growing nitista threat. His supporters at the Luanda airport prevented white Portuguese technicians from getting off their airplane, even though they had come to Angola to volunteer their services-just like the Tecnica volunteers I placed in Africa 15 years later. Paul Fauvet reports:

A Portuguese engineer in the Public Works Ministry was savagely beaten up, and some Portuguese were even murdered, apparently in attempts to spread panic in what remained of Luanda’s Portuguese community.

Acts of insubordination and near-mutiny arose in the army and the MPLA worried that the country would soon become ungovernable. Finally, in May 1977, the MPLA central committee decided to take action against the nitistas. It took notice of the factionalism that was destabilizing the country and announced its intention to bring it to a halt. Alves’s response bordered on hysteria, accusing Angola’s daily newspaper Jornal de Angola, their Barricada in effect, of playing the same role in Angola that the right-wing press played in Chile before Pinochet’s coup. Nito Alves then demanded that everybody except he and his supporters step down from the Central Committee in order to allow him to form a new one that was truly revolutionary. When President Neto and the majority of the CC declined Alves’s offer, he decided to go ahead with a coup d’etat that he had been planning for some time.

Scheduled for late May 1976, the nitista CPB’s and loyalists in the military would form “Death Commandoes” to liquidate their enemies in the Central Committee and spearhead an assault on state power.

On May 27^th the coup was set into motion. nitistas attacked a prison and released a dozen of their supporters as well as hundreds of common criminals. They also seized two radio stations and began broadcasting calls for a mass demonstration that would surround the Presidential Palace. Unfortunately for them, the people of Angola were totally unsympathetic and only 500 people gathered at the Presidential Palace.

On the military front, things were just as bleak for the nitistas. Paul Fauvet reports:

One barracks fell to the nitistas-that of the Ninth Armored Brigade. They also captured a fort on the outskirts of Luanda-but as soon as loyal troops appeared there, the rebel commanders fled and the soldiers laid down their arms, saying that they didn’t know what was going on, but had been told by nitista officers that they were ‘defending the revolution.’

In the next paragraph, Fauvet deals with the Cuban connection. Suffice it to day, it has nothing to do with Farber’s false charge about meddling in Angolan politics:

Confessions of nitista leaders soon after May 17 show that Alves believed that the Cuban forces in Angola would at least stay neutral in the conflict, if not rally to him. He was therefore shocked to discover that the Cubans had immediately put themselves at President Neto’s disposal. When questioning Veloso [a nitista] mid-morning on the situation in the centre of Luanda, Alves asked “And you even saw the Cuban comrades?”. When Veloso confirmed this, Alves remarked “Then I shall have to review my understanding of scientific communism”.

To this I would only add the observation that Sam Farber and the ISO should too review their “understanding of scientific communism”. To fault the Cubans for supporting a revolutionary government that obviously enjoyed the support of the country against a coup d’etat led by a crazed factionalist responsible for the murder of white Angolans whose only offense was being white is incontrovertible evidence that the comrades are simply not interested in the truth. In order to find Cuba guilty in the court of socialist public opinion, they have only indicted themselves.

Steven Soderbergh’s “Che”

I was apprehensive about Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” before seeing it yesterday, mostly fearing a Hollywood director’s attempt to “interpret” Che. While I didn’t expect anything as outrageous as the 1969 “Che!” starring Omar Sharif as Che and Jack Palance (!) as Fidel Castro, which Roger Ebert described as having a dramatic level that “aspires toward comic strips,” I wondered what the director of “Oceans 11″ might possibly have to say about a revolutionary socialist.

As it turns out, “Che” is a serious and honest attempt to represent at least one aspect of Che Guevara’s career, namely the guerrilla fighter. The movie is divided in two parts, one based on “Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War” and the other on the Bolivian diary. As a sign of Soderbergh’s bona fides, he used Jon Lee Anderson as a consultant for part one. Anderson’s biography of Che Guevara is quite good, up until the point when revolutionaries begin governing. Anderson was happy to write about Guevara’s heroism in battle, but much less willing to give credit to the socialist experiment now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary.

It should be added that Soderbergh has serious ambitions as a film-maker, despite projects like “Oceans 11″ that pay the rent (and which obviously he has fun making.) I strongly recommend “Bubble“, a technically innovative murder mystery involving blue-collar workers in the rust belt. Another Soderbergh film that critics regard as high-minded and daring is “Traffic”, a policier about the Mexican drug trade into the U.S. Soderbergh’s movie was based on the British TV movie “Traffik” that focused on the connections between those involved in the Pakistani heroin trade, from lowly poppy growers to super-rich exporters, and the British users, including the daughter of an anti-drug crusading MP. As I tried to explain in my review of “Traffic”, Soderbergh failed to deliver the kind of subtle class analysis found in the British teleplay. Indeed, despite all the critical raves, he sought nothing more than to make an elevated version of “Miami Vice” as this excerpt from my review would make clear.

Soderbergh is quite open about his desire to flatter law enforcement agencies in the USA, while simultaneously maintaining a hip “war on drugs can not succeed” ‘tude. In a profile that appears in the Jan. 3-9 Village Voice, Soderbergh states

“I didn’t want to come off like we had answers. The idea that some silly filmmaker after two years could sort it out would be outrageous. But there seems to be a huge vacuum in the public debate and I guess this is one of the few times I felt a movie could actually help. The funny thing is, everybody who sees it thinks it puts their point of view across, and I was expecting exactly the opposite. We had a screening in Washington for Customs, DEA, and the Department of Justice and they all came out saying they really liked it. The following night, there was some hardcore leftie NPR/PBS [!!!!] screening in L.A. and some guy stands up and goes, ‘Thank you for making the first pro-legalization movie.’ Then the other night, Commissioner Safir came to a screening and said he thought it was the most accurate representation of law enforcement he’d seen in a long time. And I have, you know, stoner friends who are going, like, ‘Dude, yeah, great . . . ‘”

Since the “hip” movie-makers of today would never get caught dead making “propaganda” films like “Battle of Algiers” or “Land and Freedom”, I suppose that we can be grateful for what amounts to a positive image of Che Guevara. The portrait that emerges from Soderbergh’s epic is that of a heroic, deeply idealistic and self-sacrificing revolutionary. One scene stands out. As the guerrilla army is headed toward Havana in 1959 for the final assault on the old regime, Che (Benicio Del Toro) spots a group of combatants in a fancy Chrysler convertible. He speeds ahead in his jeep and after forcing them to the side of the road, orders them to return the car to its owner, even if he was a Batista official. The revolution must operate on different principles than the old regime, including the need to avoid personal gain.

Earlier in the movie, Che has tracked down a couple of men who were in his guerrilla column briefly but who after leaving began demanding money from peasants in the name of the revolution. One of the men even raped one of their daughters. Once the two were apprehended, Che had them executed. This scene conveys Che Guevara’s determination to uphold the reputation of the movement, but it also serves to illustrate a kind of ruthlessness that is essential to Soderbergh’s portrait. In another scene, he invites any of the men or women under his command to step forward if they are tired of fighting and wish to return home. As they do, he begins denouncing them as “cowards” and “faggots”. In my view, this scene was essential for preserving Soderbergh’s reputation as somebody too cool for Che Guevara hero worship. Whether or not Che Guevara ever behaved this way or used such homophobic language is another story altogether.

By far the most dramatic scene in part one of “Che” is a battle scene set in Santa Clara, the last city that had to be taken before the final assault on Havana. This is an exciting firefight involving an attack on an armored train and other heavily fortified strongholds of Batista’s troops. One of these is a church that has a clear firing line across the city. Since it is too dangerous to make a direct assault on the church, the guerrillas break through the walls of five houses adjacent to the church. As each wall gives way to a sledge hammer, the tension mounts. As much as I enjoyed this scene, I couldn’t help but wondering if Soderbergh saw much difference between choreographing this action and that of breaking into the vault of a Las Vegas hotel in one of the Oceans 11 series.

Although most of the film is devoted to the technical issues of training guerrillas and preparing for battle, concerns that are uppermost in the minds of Soderbergh and screenwriter Peter Buchman (his previous credits are “Eragon”, a children’s movie about dragons, and “Jurassic Park III” for what that’s worth), there are references to politics scattered throughout the movie. In flash-forward’s, we see Che giving rousing anti-imperialist speeches to the U.N. that will generally not be heard at your local Cineplex’s.

You also hear differences of opinion between Che and Fidel (played rather effectively by Demián Bichir in what is admittedly a secondary role) over the usefulness of urban-based mass action. Fidel is for it, Che is dubious. Clearly, Soderbergh is ill-equipped to dig too deep into the political questions revolving around this debate since it would take much more of an engagement with the Cuban revolutionary process. Julia E. Sweig’s “Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground” makes a rather convincing case that without the trade unions and student movement, the guerrillas would not have succeeded. A movie that deals with the Cuban revolution in all its facets has yet to be made and when it is made, I doubt that any Hollywood film-maker would be up to the task.

Even when “Che” pays lip-service to the idea of mass action, the real message is that an armed struggle by a determined minority is what transformed Cuba. In one of the cities that has fallen to the guerrillas, a citizen approaches Che to thank him for being delivered from the Batista tyranny. Che chides him by saying that it was the people who were responsible, not the guerrillas. Since the movie does not show a single scene of people being mobilized, except for briefly putting up barricades in the Santa Clara fighting, the politically unsophisticated audience member would have no idea what Che was talking about. Despite the words he puts in his character’s mouths, Soderbergh’s revolution was more Blanquist than Marxist.

Since part one was based on “Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War”, I decided to take a quick look at some of the chapters that are online at the Marxists Internet Archives as a kind of reality check. This is a book that I have not read before, but am indirectly familiar with its contents since it provides much of the substance of Jon Lee Anderson’s biography.

While much of it jibes with the portrait of Che in Soderbergh’s movie, there are passages that reveal Che to be a much more complex figure. Missing from the movie is any sense of the vulnerability expressed in “Alegría De Pío”, chapter 3 of part one of the Reminiscences. Che writes:

This might have been the first time I was faced, literally, with the dilemma of choosing between my devotion to medicine and my duty as a revolutionary soldier. There, at my feet, was a backpack full of medicine and a box of ammunition. They were too heavy to carry both. I picked up the ammunition, leaving the medicine, and started to cross the clearing, heading for the cane field. I remember Faustino Pérez, on his knees in the bushes, fi ring his submachine gun. Near me, a compañero named [Emilio] Albentosa was walking toward the cane field. A burst of gunfire hit us both. I felt a sharp blow to my chest and a wound in my neck; I thought for certain I was dead. Albentosa, vomiting blood and bleeding profusely from a deep wound made by a .45-caliber bullet, screamed something like, “They’ve killed me,” and began to fire his rife although there was no one there. Flat on the ground, I said to Faustino, “I’m fucked,” and Faustino, still shooting, looked at me and told me it was nothing, but I saw in his eyes he considered me as good as dead. Still on the ground, I fired a shot toward the woods, on an impulse like that of my wounded companion. I immediately began to think about the best way to die, since in that minute all seemed lost. I remembered an old Jack London story in which the hero, aware that he is about to freeze to death in Alaskan ice, leans against a tree and prepares to die with dignity. That was the only thing that came to my mind. Someone, on his knees, shouted that we should surrender, and I heard a voice – later I found out it belonged to Camilo Cienfuegos – shouting, “No one surrenders here!” followed by a swear word. [José] Ponce approached me, agitated and breathing hard. He showed me a bullet wound that appeared to have pierced his lungs. He told me he was wounded and I replied, indifferently, that I was as well. Then Ponce, along with other unhurt compañeros, crawled toward the cane field. For a moment I was alone, just lying there waiting to die. Almeida approached, urging me to go on, and despite the intense pain I dragged myself into the cane field. There I saw the great compañero  Raúl Suárez, whose thumb had been blown away by a bullet, being attended by Faustino Pérez, who was bandaging his hand. Then everything blurred – low- flying airplanes strafing the field, adding to the confusion – amid scenes that were at once Dantesque and grotesque, such as an overweight combatant trying to hide behind a single sugarcane stalk, or a man who kept yelling for silence in the din of gunfire, for no apparent reason.

About part two of “Che”, the less said the better. Like Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”, it is pretty much two hours of fairly graphic suffering, all intended to resonate with the popular image of Che Guevara as martyr to the cause. I only sat through it because I felt obligated to review both parts of the movie. But all in all, part two did not have anything to say that wasn’t already said in the 1994 documentary “Ernesto Che Guevara, The Bolivian Diary” that is a nonstop nightmare of asthma attacks, betrayal, and futility.

Finally, I would recommend that you look at what the Cubans had to say about Soderbergh’s movie. On December 5^th 2008, Granma’s film critic Rolando Perez Betancourt advised his readers:

Among the films that most interest filmgoers at Havana’s New Latin American Cinema Festival is The Argentine and The Guerrilla, centered on the figure of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the two films were scheduled to be premiered over the weekend. A first rapprochement to this over four-hour ambitious story allows us to speak about a respectful approach to such a legendary figure, without leaving out the controversies both in terms of the treatment of certain historical contents and its aesthetic connotations.

When we watch The Argentine and The Guerrilla, the first thing that comes to mind, especially with respect to the first one, is the kind of audience it will have, because, if movie goers overseas and less seasoned in Cuban history can find credibility and authenticity, both in the development of characters and in the performance of actors, someone who has grown up in these lands detects the false tone of some recreations, or the histrionic imitation trying to make up for a real complex character.

Allow me to cite two examples, among many: the image of late Cuban leader Camilo Cienfuegos. The actor has a startling resemblance with him but he is conceived in the script in such an oversimplified way that he seems to be a comedian from a fair. The Fidel Castro interpreted by Demian Bechir, whose work has been praised, depicts the gestures that became an iconographic collection of the first years of the Revolution, but don’t go beyond an exact replica; he lacks charisma and depth.

At this point of evolving aesthetics, in which very few people would think of demanding absolute fidelity between historical facts and their artistic transposition, the aforementioned aspect can’t stop being risky in a story that takes place on the most faithful tracks of realism. In its first part it displays an efficient style of documentary narration, in black and white, making reference to Che’s visit to the United Nations and the interview he gave a US journalist, all of which lends itself to set out, from the astuteness of his thinking, the ideological his convictions.

The first part, shot after the second one, has a linear structure made up by a series of historical facts –the journey of the Granma yacht, the battles in the Sierra Maestra mountains, the treatment given to traitors, the new forces joining the guerrillas, the battle of Santa Clara–, which is imposed as a mere graphic reconstruction of something already known. And between episodes of combat and historical characters that don’t convince due to their lack of depth on the script, the filmmakers barely approach the decisive factor in movies of this type: emotion.

The Argentine lacks dramatic writing, and not precisely because it avoids seeking the “exact” nature of facts, but rather because every now and then the director gives the impression of losing his way amid so much abundance of material and characters.

We must applaud Soderbergh and Benicio del Toro, the actor that efficiently manages to make the public get closer to a flesh and blood hero of high spiritual stature and for accepting the challenge of taking this story to the screen, taking into account that Che Guevara is one of the most loved and at the same time hated figures in the history of humankind, and there’s no need to underline the ideological and social differences of those both sides.

The purpose of the two artists has been, undoubtedly, to reflect a man that has become a legend without turning the story they’re telling into a myth. If we talk about results, I wouldn’t hesitate to affirm that in spite of its defects, these two films are more positive than negative in an international framework in which Che Guevara’s figure is the object of the most dissimilar manipulations.

We all know what the figure of Che Guevara has been in the hands of the Hollywood, which in no way should be interpreted as a consolation of what is now admissible (Soderbergh’s Che Guevara) compared to the garbage made before. Cuban cinematography will have to assume, at some point, its own challenge of telling these stories with their most authentic nuances and not exempt from controversy.

If in the first part of this long movie there’s a deficient artistic making, in the second, The Guerrilla, we can appreciate that Soderbergh has grown up as a storyteller, in command of a visual density of higher caliber. However, for those who have read Che’s diary and other documents about those days in Bolivia the same question comes to surface: why the producers preferred to highlight less important events over others that were more significant, or changed the names and attitudes of some of the guerrillas.

And, on this point, the critic stopped writing to knock on the door of the Center for Che Guevara Studies, an entity that since the beginning of Soderbergh’s project was in contact with the director and put in his hands the most varied documents and the historical advise he needed, both in terms of theory and facts. This was hard work that, according to the Center’ executives, never questioned the logical changes historical facts could have on the screen, but yes, seeing to it that their essence was not distorted.

Hence the Center -which helped to correct mistakes on the first drafts and threw light over several confused aspects-, has some reservations and dissatisfactions with respect to the finished work, among them -just to mention one- the lightweight treatment given to the character of Tania la guerrilla.

All these aspects should be taken into account at the time of watching Soderbergh’s Che Guevara on the Havana big screens.

Marc Cooper: a true Annenbergian

Walter Annenberg: after Rupert Murdoch bought the TV Guide from him, it became more liberal

When the ultraright was pursuing a guilt by association attack on Obama for serving on the same board of directors as “terrorist” Bill Ayers, his supporters pointed out that it was the late Walter Annenberg who launched the nonprofit dedicated to improving public schools upon whose board they served. Since Annenberg was Richard Nixon’s Ambassador to Great Britain as well as a close friend of Ronald Reagan, how could anybody accuse Ayers or Obama of being some kind of dangerous radical? Considering the assault on public education that the Republican Party right has led since the early 1970s, it might seem a bit of contradiction for Annenberg to be lavishing his millions on such a project. Of course, if your goal is to eliminate state funding of public schools and replace them with a “thousand points of light” type charities, then Annenberg’s largesse begins to make sense.

Annenberg became one of America’s top philanthropists in the 1980s, using the profits of an ill-gotten media empire to finance a host of “do gooder” projects. There is obviously a long tradition of unsavory capitalists trying to burnish their reputation through such deeds, the most famous example being Andrew Carnegie. If the board of directors of Carnegie-Mellon Institute or Carnegie Hall ever thought much about their institutions being financed by the blood money drained from the dead bodies of steelworkers, they probably would have never ended up on such a board to begin with. Nominations to such boards are carefully vetted to make sure that the candidates are carefully trained in the core values of the capitalist system, evidence of which is most manifest in the inclusion of solid citizens like Bill Ayers and Barack Obama.

Like many other members of the American ruling class, Walter Annenberg was born rich. His father Moses “Moe” Annenberg published the Daily Racing Form, just what one might expect from a career criminal who worked as a circulation manager for William Randolph Hearst. In the circulation wars of the early 20^th century, Moe and his henchmen used “robber baron” type tactics. Newsboys were beaten, newsstands torched, and delivery vans overturned if they were identified as working for Hearst’s competition. Moe Annenberg was convicted of tax evasion in 1939 and his son, now a company VP, was indicted on charges of “aiding and abetting.” In a deal struck with prosecutors, Walter’s charges were dropped in exchange for his father’s guilty plea.

Moe Annenberg died a few weeks after being released from prison and Walter Annenberg took over the family business, which now included two Philadelphia dailies, the Inquirer and the Daily News. The Philadelphia Daily News distinguished itself by boosting the career of Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo, an out and out racist who eventually became mayor. Rizzo’s cops carried out a raid on the Black Panther Party on August 31, 1970 that included a strip search of the arrested men, a picture of which ran on the Philadelphia Daily News front page the next day and that was then circulated around the world.

The Philadelphia Inquirer was not much better. In 1966, Annenberg used the paper as a cudgel against Democrat Milton Shapp, who was running for governor. Shapp made the mistake of opposing a merger of the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad, a corporation that counted Walter Annenberg as the largest individual stockholder. Annenberg had one of his reporters ask Shapp at a press conference if he had ever been a patient in a mental hospital. Since he had not, he simply replied “no”. A day later, a front page Inquirer headline screamed: “Shapp Denies Mental Institution Stay.” Shapp lost the election largely because of this smear.

While TV Guide, a property that Annenberg acquired in 1952, might seem to be last place to serve as a rightwing outlet, he used it to rail against the liberal media culture. This led Jack Shafer, author of a 2002 Slate obit titled “Citizen Annenberg: So long, you rotten bastard” to opine that “TV Guide may be the only publication to become more liberal after Rupert Murdoch purchased it.”

Shafer describes Annenberg’s retirement years as follows:

President Richard Nixon rewarded Annenberg for his anti-communism and pro-Vietnam-War views by appointing him ambassador to Great Britain, where he attacked U.S. student radicals in his first speech. Ambassador Annenberg, as he thereafter preferred to be called, returned to the States and expanded both his media properties and burgeoning art collection. He also entertained the flow of human sewage that visited him at his own Xanadu, a mansion set on 250 acres (complete with its own golf course) in Palm Springs. There at “Sunnylands,” he hosted the disgraced Nixon (“Life is 99 rounds,” he told Dick), the detestable Frank Sinatra, and offered refuge for his political soul mate, the shah of Iran. Talk about guilt by association.

Among the institutions that have been the benefactors of Annenberg’s deep wallet is the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication, reflecting its founder’s ostensible commitment to the mass media.

Marc Cooper: on the side of American interests in Cuba and Venezuela

Among the faculty is Marc Cooper, who, like Bill Ayers, can be described as a chastened 1960s radical. One has no idea how Cooper comports himself in the classroom, but his public utterances on Latin America can certainly be described as Annenbergian. For quite some time now, Cooper has carried out a campaign against Cuba and Venezuela in print and electronic publications that can scarcely be distinguished from what you would read in the mainstream media. When actor Sean Penn had the temerity to write about his trip to Cuba in the pages of the Nation Magazine, Cooper fulminated on his blog: “But now Penn pops up giving his own tongue bath to Raul — complete with poems and everything.”

Considering the fact that Cooper suffered a massive heart attack in 2007, he might be well-advised to shun articles that have the capacity to make him so upset. Since I am forced to read 100 anti-Cuba articles (including an interminable piece by Roger Cohen in the Sunday NY Times Magazine section) in American newspapers for every one praising Cuba, I should be under much more stress than him. Of course, I make sure to stay away from 3^rd dessert helpings.

Using his credentials as a veteran journalist, Cooper focuses his attack on media censorship in Cuba and Venezuela. It does not matter to him that much if poor people have access to education, health care and a home for the first time in their lives if the freedom of Venezuelan TV stations that participated in a coup attempt against the elected president is threatened. After all, the rights of the Venezuelan Annenbergs are much more important than those of the slum dwellers.

Cooper’s latest rant against his radical neighbors to the south can be found on the Mother Jones website, where he takes up the cause of a blogger who has run afoul of the Cuban authorities.

It seems that the Cubans are always curtailing the rights of writers who feel compelled in some way to cooperate with the country that has tried on and off for nearly a half-century to violently overthrow its government. Try and put yourself in the shoes of a Cuban leader. You have just seen the United States allow Luis Posada Carriles, a man convicted of blowing up a civilian airliner filled with your countryman, to go free. As a mental exercise, let us imagine that a Cuban national who blew up a TWA airliner in 1976 (a real stretch since the Cubans are opposed to terrorism) is allowed to go free once he is back in Cuba.

As another stretch of the imagination, let’s say that the Cubans are allowed to continue operating a quasi-embassy in the U.S. where American writers hostile to capitalism go for weekly visits to get political directions and buckets of money. How long would it take for the U.S. to crack down? In the real world, such comparisons do not obtain because the U.S.’s GDP is a thousand times larger than that of Cuba’s. When there is such a mismatch in military and economic power, naturally the bigger country can bully the smaller country. Apparently Marc Cooper enjoys making the case for bullies, just as another one-time Nation Magazine (to their credit, the Nation has found little motivation in publishing Cooper lately) contributor Christopher Hitchens does.

For Cooper, Cuba and Venezuela serve as some kind of evil twin example of socialism that is always compared unfavorably to its good twin brother-Salvador Allende’s Chile. The fact that Allende was very friendly with Fidel Castro has never bothered Cooper who is as adept at cherry-picking facts as Judith Miller.

Another fact that Cooper cannot be bothered with is Allende’s crackdown on the imperialist-backed media that in its day was exploited by enemies of the Chilean experiment just as Cooper is doing today. According to Ralph McGehee, former CIA agent, the CIA literally purchased Chile’s largest newspaper, El Mercurio, and turned a paper once considered the “New York Times” of Latin America into a screaming scandal sheet in the Philadelphia Daily News mold. El Mercurio’s radio stations also attacked Allende daily.

Instead of tolerating these attacks in the meretricious spirit of “free speech” and “democracy” that Cooper wants to foist on Cuba and Venezuela, Allende–to his credit–took action. When he did, Juan de Onis, who played the same role with respect to Chile that people like Juan Forero and Marc Cooper play today with respect to Venezuela, raised a stink in the N.Y. Times. In an article titled “Chile Suspends a Radio Station” that took up the cause of the poor, repressed Christian Democratic Party, de Onis helped the CIA make its case. As a defender of freedom of the press and democracy just as vigilant as Marc Cooper today, de Onis called attention to Radio Balmaceda being shut down and how the legal powers of Allende to act against hostile newspapers and radio stations were being expanded. De Onis pointed to the harassment of El Mercurio, whose offices were being visited on almost a daily basis by tax inspectors. El Mercurio and other anti-government newspapers were on a campaign against Allende, who had declared his intentions to nationalize the major private manufacturer of newsprint, a sure sign that the country was on the road to a totalitarian dictatorship of the kind that the Castro brothers were running in Cuba.

If Allende is to be faulted for anything, it is not being repressive enough. When your country is being subverted by the CIA, Henry Kissinger, ITT and the Chilean bourgeoisie, it is in the interests of democracy and human rights to stamp out counter-revolutionary newspapers. Indeed, the sad and inescapable conclusion one must draw from Cooper’s incessant attacks on Cuba and Venezuela is that he hopes that they will suffer the same fate as Allende’s Chile. When Cooper was younger and less established in his profession, he would have understood what a tragedy that would be. Now that he is older and a faculty member at a prestigious California university, he could care less-an example once again of the primacy of class.

Samuel Farber, the state capitalists and Cuba

(This is part of a continuing series on “Does Socialism Have a Future”. My next and concluding post will review Michael Lebowitz’s “Build it Now”)

 

Revolutionary from above?

For state capitalists or Shachtmanites, the notion of “socialism from below” serves as a kind of litmus test for revolutions. For example, David McNally, a Canadian state capitalist professor, wrote a pamphlet titled “Socialism from Below” in 1984 that condemns Trotskyist support for Cuba:

From this point onwards, the movement Trotsky had created fell victim to the ideology of socialism from above. No longer, for them, was socialism dependent upon the self-emancipation of the working class. Now any collection of guerrillas, technocrats or petty dictators who undertook to turn backward countries into modern empires by nationalising the means of wealth appeared as progressive movements. In China, Cuba, Algeria and dozens of other countries, such movements came to power. In no case were these regimes based on structures of workers’ power and workers’ democracy. Yet, more often than not, the Trotskyist movement greeted these brutally undemocratic state capitalist tyrannies as workers’ states.

In trying to understand the origins of this distinction between “above” and “below”, it is helpful to keep in mind that Lenin viewed the bourgeois revolution as having such opposed outcomes as well. In his 1899 “Development of Capitalism in Russia,” he said that the bourgeois revolution can proceed from above, such as the case of the Junkers in Germany, or from below, like the American Civil War against slavery. (Although it is not necessary to go into this here, it is certainly possible to interpret the post-Civil War period as having the same characteristics as Junkers Germany, namely a continuation of the plantation system under less feudal-like conditions.)

In a very important article on the bourgeois revolution that appeared in Vol 13., Issue 4 of “Historical Materialism” in 2005, British SWP’er Neil Davidson made a very convincing case for the need to detach the category ‘democratic’ from “bourgeois democratic revolutions.” Agreeing with Lenin, he sees the bourgeois revolution as being accomplished either from above or below. Ultimately, we are talking about qualitative changes in the mode of production and nothing else.

In the concluding pages of his article, Davidson takes exception to Isaac Deutscher who saw Stalin as a kind of socialist Junkers imposing socialism from above on Eastern Europe after WWII. Unlike the bourgeois revolution, the socialist revolution can only come from below. As he puts it in reckless disregard of dialectics, “the exploited class under capitalism will achieve the socialist revolution, or it will not be achieved at all.” I guess this illustrates Aristotle’s rule of the excluded middle, although it has been years since I was a philosophy student. Furthermore, state ownership of the economy is not sufficient to determine if a workers state exists. This can only be defined by whether “the working class is in political control of the state.” He adds that “democracy is not merely a desirable feature, but a necessity for socialism.”

Implicit in this analysis is the idea that all political tendencies outside the state capitalist movement are not up to the task of building socialism since they lack the theoretical insights of Tony Cliff and his followers that are a precondition for workers democracy. (It must be added, however, that these insights did not prevent the British SWP from unceremoniously booting the American ISO out of their movement.) Set up as a separate and distinct ideological tendency within Marxism, it sees its goal as creating an alternative to Stalinist state capitalism.

At the time of its founding, the state capitalist movement had a fairly easy job on its hands. With the USSR clearly controlled by a privileged and antidemocratic social layer, Tony Cliff and his followers sought to create untainted socialist leaderships everywhere in the world that could challenge the state capitalists for power. This was a black-and-white, almost Manichean, struggle that was mandated by the clear evidence of Soviet brutality in East Germany, Hungary and elsewhere.

In 1959, things got a bit more complicated.

A guerrilla group overthrew the Batista dictatorship with no help from the Cuban Communists and began to build a kind of socialism that had little in common with the USSR. That, at least, is how most independent-minded radicals saw it. However, if your goal is to maintain a kind of brand loyalty to a particular ideology, it is incumbent upon you to highlight everything that stinks about your competitor. If you are in the car rental business, you have to point out that the competition does not have locations near major airports. If you are in the laxative business, you have to point out that other brands take longer to kick in and you know how bad that can be. If you are in the revolutionary socialism business, it is necessary to point out that your rivals are not really proletarian and are hostile to democracy.

For many years now, Brooklyn College professor Samuel Farber has been providing talking points to the state capitalists for use against the competition. As an ostensible expert (he was born there), he has the kind of authority that others lack.

For example, ISO’er Paul D’Amato finds Farber’s musings on the class nature of the July 26^th movement essential to his January–February 2007 International Socialist Review article titled “Cuba: Image and Reality.”

What was the class nature of the revolution? The July 26th Movement’s core around Castro consisted of men from different social classes, mostly from the cities, but even those from the working class had not been active in unions or other working-class organizations before joining Castro. Likewise, peasant guerrilla recruits, “typically had little or no history of previous organized peasant struggles,” notes Sam Farber. “This was very important in allowing Fidel Castro to mould these men into faithful followers of his caudillo leadership. In any case, an inner circle of ‘classless’ men unattached to the organizational life of any of the existing Cuban social classes became Fidel Castro’s political core.”

The footnote attached to this paragraph refers to Farber’s recently published “The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered,” an altogether worthless book that does more damage to the ISO’s reputation than to the Cuban revolutionary movement. I want to take up some of Farber’s major points and then conclude with some thoughts on the question of “socialism from below” and the Cuban revolution.

Chapter two of Farber’s hatchet job is titled “Fidel Castro and the Cuban Populist Tradition.” It is the kind of claptrap one would hear at an American Political Science Association (APSA) convention. After establishing the existence of a populist tradition in Cuba that José Martí supposedly belonged to, Farber then goes through a laborious exercise to prove that Fidel Castro was a populist as well. Apparently, what people think is more important than what they do. Citing a couple of “Marti scholars”, Pedro Gonzalez and Iván E. Schulman, Farber notes that “strong elements of stoicism and romanticism also featured prominently in Martí’s thinking and subsequently became fixtures in the Cuban populist tradition…” Well, so much for historical materialism.

To put it mildly, the term “populist” is next to useless in describing either José Martí or Fidel Castro. In drawing a distinction between the cross-class character of the Cuban liberation movement and the proletarian-oriented Communists, Farber shows that he has little understanding of Leninist politics. This, of course, should not come as any great surprise since he wrote a book that blamed Lenin for Stalin’s rise. Others of us, including the state capitalist comrades, would presumably have more use for Lenin–especially on the national question.

Karl A. Radek: like Farber, had no use for middle-class movements

On May 9, 1916, Lenin noted that Karl Radek had described the Irish rebellion as being a “putsch.” Since, according to Radek, “the Irish question was an agrarian one”, the peasants had been pacified by reforms, and the nationalist movement remained only a “purely urban, petty-bourgeois movement, which, notwithstanding the sensation it caused, had not much social backing…”, there was no need to back something that obviously was just as “romantic” as Marti’s populism. Lenin had no use for this kind of workerist sectarianism. He answered Radek as follows:

To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie without all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.–to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and says, “We are for socialism”, and another, somewhere else and says, “We are for imperialism”, and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view would vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a “putsch”.

Oddly enough, despite his professions for the need for “socialism from below,” Farber has a weak spot for the Popular Socialist Party in Cuba (the dirty no-good Stalinists) whose working class orientation was in stark contrast to the wishy-washy populists and their amorphous “Cuban people.” A large part of Farber’s infatuation has to do with the high “theoretical level” of the Cuban Communists compared to their populist rivals in the Orthodoxo Party (Castro belonged to its youth wing) and elsewhere, as if being able to explain the Grundrisse could make up for horse-trading with Batista.

In comparison, the guerrillas were a bunch of romantics who went to the hills “for an ideal”, but as the fighter who uttered these words went on to say, he had no idea what the word “ideal” meant. Farber writes that “he had heard the expression and figured it was a good thing.” These are people who would appear to enjoy shooting just for the fun of it, like members of the National Rifle Association in the United States.

Even worse, the July 26^th fighters were motivated more by a sense of honor rather than social justice, a quality that linked them to the Sicilian Mafia. Citing a rafter of Cuban “scholars,” Farber asserts that honor has been the “cornerstone of social consciousness” in Cuba for the entire 20^th century, a trait they share not only with the Mafia but with southern slave owners and medieval lords as well. So unlike the proletarian and theoretically grounded Cuban Communists, the July 26^th movement fought for ideals that it did not understand and had a taste for settling feuds like the American gangsters that Batista welcomed.

So far we have established that Fidel Castro’s movement was populist, gun crazy and consumed with notions of “honor” like the Mafia. If that wasn’t bad enough, we soon discover that it was racist as well. Unlike the Cuban Communists, who went out of their way to recruit Blacks, the populist movement “failed to recognize the special oppression of black Cubans.”

Although Richard Gott is not the hostile propagandist that Samuel Farber is, he does concur that the July 26^th movement gave short shrift to Afro-Cubans. In his recently published “Cuba: a New History,” Gott writes:

The Revolution was to create avenues of economic progress for the great mass of the black population, but without a programme of US-style positive discrimination their social and political advance remained slow. By 1979 there were still only 5 black ministers out of 34, 4 (out of 14) black members of the politburo of the Cuban Communist Party, and 16 (out of 146) members of the Party’s central committee. No black generals served in Angola, although most of the troops were black.

Despite this, Gott does give credit to the Cuban government for ending Jim Crow shortly after taking power and for funneling urgently needed resources to the countryside, which had a high representation of Afro-Cubans. Part of the problem, of course, is figuring out what it means to be a Black in Cuba. Some scholars believe that 70 percent of the Cuban population is descended partially from African slaves. In the 1980s, I worked with a programmer named Gabriel whose father was a sergeant in Batista’s army. He had a coffee complexion and told me that his pipe-smoking grandmother who worshipped the Santeria gods was black as coal. Was Gabriel white? Certainly not in the eyes of the average New Yorker.

Chapter four of Farber’s book is titled “The Driving Force of the Cuban Revolution: From Above or From Below?” It begins with a categorical denial that “mass pressures from below played a critical role in determining the course followed by the revolutionary leadership.”

It is essential for Farber to make such an argument since the overall schema is one of a government carrying out structural reforms, often counterproductive ones, over the heads of a population that stood by with its arms folded and that eventually was ordered about like servants. In this scenario, the guerrillas shot their way into power against an army that was decaying from within, like a termite-ridden house, and then took the reins of government to carry out social experiments inspired by the state capitalist USSR.

Louis A. Pérez Jr. on Cuba in 1959:
“Pressure for immediate, deep, sweeping change was building from below“

In his acknowledgements, Farber thanks Louis A. Pérez Jr. for his penetrating and useful criticisms but holds himself “solely responsible” for the views expressed in the book. One wonders if this might have something to do with the 180 degree difference between him and Perez over the question of mass pressure from below. In Perez’s “Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution,” we get quite a different view of the mood and activities of the Cuban people at the time of the revolution:

The rhetoric of revolution awakened the imagination of hundreds of thousands of Cubans, creating a vast constituency for radical change. It raised expectations of revolution, and not since 1933 had Cuban hopes for change reached such levels. Pressure for immediate, deep, sweeping change was building from below and the invocation of revolution encouraged it to rise to the top. Organized labor mobilized to press demands on a wide variety of issues. The Confederation de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC) demanded outright a flat 20 percent wage increase for all workers. Strikes increased in number and frequency. Six thousand workers of the Cuban Electric Company staged a slow-down strike to dramatize their demands for a wage increase. Unemployed electrical workers demonstrated at the presidential palace. Unemployed railway workers proclaimed a hunger strike, as did former employees of a Havana paper mill. Construction workers called a wildcat strike at the Moa Bay Mining Company. Restaurant workers threatened to strike. Cane cutters marched. Labor protests disrupted sugar production in twenty-one mills.

A March 9^th 1959 Washington Post article was typical. Headlined “Workers Seize Radio in Cuba Labor Dispute,” it reported that it was the second such seizure in two days. Workers had already taken over the privately-owned equipment and studios of television Channel 12 in a similar labor dispute. The final paragraph states: “A Government labor representative said the workers at Cuban Wireless rejected a company offer to turn the management of the enterprise over to them.

Does this sound like a scenario in which the workers stood by passively while a bunch of middle class guerrillas went about the business of converting Cuba into a state capitalist dungeon? Unless you are totally committed to the state capitalist faith, it would seem that the events on the ground had more in common with France in May-June 1968 than with Stalinist Poland or East Germany.

Even Fidel Castro risked being bypassed by events. The October 25, 1959 NY Times reported that the Cuban president was under tremendous pressure from the counter-revolutionary right and from the workers and peasants on the left. The article concluded:

Dr. Castro’s austerity program [dictated by the economic chaos of the just concluded revolutionary war] has no enthusiastic support from the masses of people. At the same time, the workers expect the Government to see that they get the pay raises and other advantages despite the depressed conditions of business and industry, while the landless peasantry expects to be living well.

Like few other leaders that had taken power in Latin America, Central America or the Caribbean for the better part of 50 years, Fidel Castro decided to push the dynamics of the revolution against capitalism and imperialism. If one categorizes him as a populist, there is some difficulty in explaining his trajectory. Against all odds, Samuel Farber gives it a try. Basically, Farber interprets all of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary initiatives as clever ruses to maintain power. In other words, he acceded to popular demands for land reform, workers control of industry, reduction of rents, wage hikes, etc., just to stay in power. In two paragraphs that are a departure from the heavy fog of bourgeois social science that hovers over Farber’s text, we learn that Castro broke with his ostensibly populist past in the early years of the revolution:

The announcement early in the Castro regime that serious cases of misappropriation of funds by public officials might be punished with the death penalty might have sounded harsh to foreign observers, but it was music to the ears of most Cubans, who had despaired of and become cynical about the possibility of public officials ever being honest. Cubans of all classes, particularly the working class and the poor, were pleased by the brand-new revolutionary police force’s lack of abusive behavior. Many of these new police officers were politically aware revolutionaries and had had no time to develop the deformation of character common to members of all professional repressive institutions. Other early measures—for example, the opening of all beaches to the public early in 1959—met with widespread approval among workers and the poor, especially the black population, which had been the principal victim of the private appropriation of public facilities such as beaches and, in some provincial towns, parks. So, without explicitly appealing to specific class-warfare themes early in his regime, Castro obtained and consolidated an overwhelming amount of popular support.

Months later, however, Castro started to take measures that had sharper teeth and shattered the multiclass coalition of the 1956-58 period. Thus, for example, the drastic reduction of rents by as much as 50 percent in March 1959 shook up Cuban society. While this action alienated some sections of the upper and upper-middle classes, it cemented popular support and definitively established that the revolution was dedicated to the material improvement of the working class and the poor. The May 1959 agrarian reform law eliminated whatever doubt might have remained on this score. By this time, the revolutionary regime was clearly enjoying huge popular support materially based on the substantial redistribution of income that took place during its first year in power.

Farber adds that this kind of behavior “expressed a combative and aggressive attitude toward imperialist capitalism rather than a defensive and measured response to U.S. acts against Cuba.” Quite so, and also quite distinct from the behavior of any Communist Party since the early 1920s. The normal reaction for a radical would be to solidarize with such rebels rather than to condemn them as acting “from above.” That, I am afraid, would take a willingness to admit one’s errors that is simply beyond the capability of a self-declared vanguard.

To return to the question of “below” or “above”, let us accept the verdict that the Cuban government acted from above. If this is so, then perhaps it is time to reevaluate the usefulness of Davidson’s distinction. If the Cuban government, acting from above, could carry out the following according to Farber:

1. Eliminate corruption.

2. Eliminate police brutality.

3. Democratize the beaches and other public spaces.

4. Seize the land of the wealthy and turn it over to the landless

5. Stand up to U.S. imperialism.

Then, perhaps we should view it just as much of an advance over bourgeois property relations as bourgeois property relations were over serfdom. It is one thing to maintain one’s political distance from the Kremlin after Stalin’s rise; it is another to assert that there was no qualitative difference between Cuba and Haiti after 1960.

Unfortunately, the comrades have painted themselves into a corner. They have built an ideological edifice that is much more like a house of cards. Pull out one card and the whole thing comes tumbling down.