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.