POLEMICS: Cuba in the crosshairs

The island's "trangressions" raise the temperature for American liberals, social democrats and Marxian leftists

THE

ESSENTIALS

"Things are going well" proclaims this billboard, in

characteristic defiance

BACKGROUND:

As Washington, at present mercifully distracted by its maladventure in Iraq, stealthily prepares for the opportunity to intervene more muscularly in Venezuela and Colombia, an assault that will surely include the devastation of Cuba and probably military attacks to set up some form of "democratic beahhead," Cuba and her leader, Pres. Fidel Castro, find themselves under increasing attack by coteries of American liberals and Social Democrats. Their accusations—summed up in a document called the Statement Protesting Repression in Cuba—center around alleged human rights violations and an "obsolete" autocratic style supposedly leading to a Stalinist-style bureaucratism.

The political engine behind this controversial document is the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (CPD), directed by Joanne Landy and two less well-known co-directors. Leading CPD members include Michael Albert, Stanley Aronowitz, Mel Bienenfeld, Eileen Boris, Robert Brenner, Stephen Bronner, Noam Chomsky, Joshua Cohen, Mike Davis, Ariel Dorfman, Melinda Downey, Mark Dow, Barry Finger, Barbara Ehrenreich, Samuel Farber, Janeane Garofalo, Barbara Garson, Susan Griffin, Thomas Harrison, Michael Hirsch, Adam Hochschild, Doug Ireland, Alan Johnson, Jesse Lemisch, John Leonard, Sue Leonard, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Nelson Lichtenstein, Arthur Lipow, Gretchen Lipow, Michael Lowy, Grace Paley, Christopher Phelps, Katha Pollitt, Matthew Rothschild, Edward Said, and others. This is indeed an impressive list with people of obvious talent and demonstrated progressive instincts and records. It is therefore sad to see them now involved in this ill-advised pursuit. What follows is an exchange reflecting the fissures that the Cuba issue is causing among the various sectors of the American "left." I use the quotation marks, not in derision but because, quite frankly, I think some people in these groups are actually kidding themselves. With a rump political spectrum that is dramatically weighted to the right, what has been usually recognized as the "center" is normally perceived in the US as "left."

This classification obviously includes social democrats of the "Fabian," and German Social Democratic variety, which, as willing co-managers of capitalism, hardly qualify as exponents of authentic left thinking or antiimperialism, further contributing to the confusion.

The exchange we repro below originated in a political list, the "left-wing yahoo group", where Michael Pugliese posted the folllowing in an effort to attack the Fidelistas' "Stalinist" posture, suggesting, I suppose, that this is where it will all end unless Fidel promptly resigns and the island is committed to US-style elections.

(1) FIRST POST BY MICHAEL PUGLIESE

From:
Subject: [Left-wing] Re: Marcuse—further comments
Date: October 31, 2005 2:00:00 PM EST
To:
Reply-To:

Heh, you can look me up in the Denver white pages, w/o scare quotes,
Michael is my real name.
The official figures from the fSU of GULAG inmates and "premature
deaths." From a volume ed. by scholar, J. Arch Getty, despised by
Horowitz, Robert Conquest and co.

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2005w04/msg00183.htm
Roy Medvedev in his 'Let History Judge' said:

'In 1936-39, on the most cautious estimates, four to five
million people were subjected to repression for political
reasons. At least four to five hundred thousand of them--above
all the high officials--were summarily shot; the rest were given
long terms of confinement. In 1937-38 alone there were days when
up to a thousand people were shot in Moscow alone. These were not
streams, these were rivers of blood, the blood of honest Soviet
people. The simple truth must be stated: not one of the tyrants
of the past persecuted and destroyed so many of his compatriots."

Conquest debated R.W. Davies on this in New Left Review issues,
219, 1996, pgs.143-44 and #225, 1997, pgs. 157-60.

Premature Excess Deaths by Shooting
1929 2,109
1930 20,201
1931 10,651
1932 2,278
1933 2,154
1934 2,056
1935 1,229
1936 1,118
1937 353,074
1938 328,618
1939 3,783

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2002/2002-November/025964.html
piggybacking from John Lacny's post
http://www.egroups.com/message/marxist/1436 ) ...I have culled
the following from "Table 5: Secret Police (GPU, OGPU, NKVD)
Arrests and Sentences, 1921-39" in J. Arch Getty's and Oleg V.
Naumov's _The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destructon of
the Bolsheviks_, Yale University Press, 1999, p. 588. Getty and
Naumov rely on a huge swath of the Soviet archives which have
been released since 1991, and their numbers are authoritative; I
know of no serious refutation of them, from any "side." For what
they're worth, these are the facts. The statistics below cover
the relevant period under discussion, 1929-1939. I have not
reproduced the entire chart here; keep in mind that not all of
these are for political offenses, although the majority are (for
"counterrevolutionary crimes" and "anti-Soviet agitation").

I've devised a key as follows:

(1) Year

(2) Total Arrests
(3) Convictions
(4) Shot
(5) Camps and prison
(6) Exiled

*****************************************************************
*****

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

1929 162,726 56,220 2,109 25,853 24,517

1930 331,544 208,069 20,201 114,443 58,816
1931 479,065 180,696 10,651 105,683 63,269
1932 410,433 141,919 2,278 73,946 36,017
1933 505,256 239,664 2,154 138,903 54,262
1934 205,173 78,999 2,056 59,451 5,994
1935 193,083 267,076 1,229 185,846 33,601
1936 131,168 274,670 1,118 219,418 23,719
1937 936,750 790,665 353,074 429,311 1,366
1938 638,509 554,258 328,618 205,509 16,842
1939 2,552 54,666 3,783

*****************************************************************
*****

You can notice a period of particularly vicious repression

in 1930-31 during the most turbulent years of the Five Year Plan and
collectivization; then, in the Purges of 1937-38, an
unparralleled orgy of arrests and executions.

Getty and Naumov write further that "The population
of all labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons on 1 January 1939, near the
end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. This gives us a total
increase in the camp and prison population in 1937-38 of
1,006,030." (p. 590) Some may wince at the comparison, but the
prison population in the United States today is around 2 million.

Moreover: "According to the NKVD archival material
currently available, 681,692 people were shot in 1937-38
(compared with 1,118 persons in 1936). These archival figures,
coming from a statistical report 'on the quantity of people
convicted upon cases of NKVD bodies,' include victims who had not
been arrested for political reasons, whereas the KGB press
release concerns only persons persecuted for
'counterrevolutionary offenses.' In any event, the data available
at this point make it clear that the number shot in the two worst
purge years was more likely in the hundreds of thousands than in
the millions. The only period between 1930 and the outbreak of
the war when the number of death sentences for nonpolitical
crimes outstripped the ones meted out to 'counterrevolutionaries'
was from August 1932 to the last quarter of 1933.

"Aside from executions in the terror of 1937-38, many
others died in the regime's custody during the 1930s. If we add
the figure we have for executions up to 1940 to the number of
persons who died in GULAG camps and the few figures we found on
mortality in prisons and labor colonies, then add to this the
number of peasants known to have died in exile, we reach a figure
of nearly 1.5 million deaths directly due to repression in the
1930s." (p. 591)

--
Michael Pugliese

(2) REPLY BY MARK (another member of same list)

On Oct 31, 2005, at 5:49 PM, wrote:
In a message dated 10/31/2005 12:01:15 PM Mountain Standard Time, writes:
These were not streams, these were rivers of blood, the blood of honest Soviet people. The simple truth must be stated: not one of the tyrants of the past persecuted and destroyed so many of his compatriots."

None of the the of the Tsars of Imperial Russia killed more people than Stalin? I find that a little hard to believe--it seems that an army of Cossacks were capable of killing every man woman and child and wiping out entire Jewish villages in a few hours. During the war it seems that the White Russian Army was capable of great atrocities against innocent civilians and the Right always seems to enjoy bloodbaths more [than] the left.

Mark

(3) MY REPLY TO BOTH

Mark,

These folks have a long history of objective collaboration with imperial designs under the cover of "democratic" ("decent") leftism. Michael Pugliese, for example, is proud of attacking Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, as "Stalinists", so you can draw your own conclusions. What makes these people act this way is beyond me, but what follows may throw some light on this very murky topic. Let me say however that after this I'm getting off the horse and putting it in stable. I don't want to waste any more time in sterile disputes on Cuba on this list, important as the topic may be. This is because enough has been said on this issue and now, as I have often suggested before, it's up to temperament. Those who tack against Cuba and Hugo Chavez today, fine, it's their problem. Let them live with the consequences. Those who choose to support Cuba and Fidel, and Hugo Chavez, that's also their prerogative, and i hope they do.

Much has been made here by the "socdem" elements in this list about the crimes of Stalin, a roster of accusations reminiscent in vigor and bile to the knee-jerk Trotskyite attacks we have heard for generations. (I'm NOT saying that they're Trots; just that their accusations have followed pretty much the same lines of argumentation, all of which has been picked up and amplified by the totally unethical propaganda system of capitalism to water and enrich its own malicious soil.) No one who is fair-minded can deny that Stalin made serious mistakes in the handling of socialist defense and construction, and that, as a result, a number of deformations were more easily introduced in the USSR, such as intense bureaucratism, cronyism, a tight security state mentality, and a whole range of abuses and crimes already abundantly cataloged by the enemies of socialism everywhere. Therefore I will not elaborate on that and grant it as a given, as a point of departure for a brief cross-examination.

Let's start by clarifying a few things.

FIGURES AND MAGNITUDES

ONE, Stalinism as an instance of "existing socialism in one nation" is NOT inherent in socialism, it is an aberration explained by specific historical circumstances. George Bush and his ilk, on the other hand, are INHERENT in "normal" capitalism (aka "bourgeois democracy"), not an ANOMALY, hence natural offshoots of the system. Thus, while the death of Stalin ushered in a new type of Soviet system, the death or replacement of George Bush will not likely introduce a new type of capitalist leader: after Bush, more Bushes with different masks—"gentler," "more ruthless," "more efficient", whatever, but all products of the world capitalist outlook and therefore sworn to expand and deepen its intrinsic features: further accumulation of power and wealth at the top; global militarism; phony democratism, overt and covert attacks on any nation seeking a new political solution outside of "neoliberal/neocon" recipes, lack of workplace democracy, etc. This may not be (to some) an earth-shattering difference, but it is a difference with substantive consequences on the world stage.

TWO, There's no point in digging up horror stories to decide the issues at hand. The history of human errors and crimes we have witnessed in the recent past seems to be more a quality inherent in our deeply flawed species, inherent in our legendary stupidity, than in any specific political system, although some political forms, literally built on exploitation, racism, etc., can hardly escape mass violence because they literally require it to breathe and prosper. Still, some figures have been thrown about, so let's look at this for a moment. Pugliese rolls out some data on Stalin's victims, concluding with,

"If we add the figure we have for executions up to 1940 to the number of persons who died in GULAG camps and the few figures we found on mortality in prisons and labor colonies, then add to this the number of peasants known to have died in exile, we reach a figure of nearly 1.5 million deaths directly due to repression in the 1930s." (p. 591)

It's a fact that the USSR saw a great deal of turmoil and repression in the 1930s, during the prelude to WW2. Assuming the figures to be reliable—always an iffy thing considering the degree of adulteration of data, black propaganda, and sheer corruption of the current Russian capitalist sources opening these archives—we can argue that about 25% of this 1.5 million victims adduced here were subject to actual direct execution or liquidation; that roughly another 30% died in labor camps as a result of hardships; and that the rest died prematurely as a result of prejudicial access to vital consumption goods, mainly food and shelter, after being singled out as opponents of the "establishment" for crimes ranging from sabotage to petit bourgeois obstructionism (serious in the countryside) in what was in many cases a protracted and complicated class struggle. This is very real suffering and should never be minimized nor forgotten, but in an imperfect world haunted by an inhuman system wishing to score points to legitimate itself at every juncture, it should be put in context.

What was the bourgeois world like during that precise period? In Europe and Asia, upon the collapse of social democratic and center-right bourgeois regimes where they existed, and the defeat of the Spanish Republic, fascism, war and bourgeois class repression were on the march, from Japanese armies pouring into China and committing all sorts of atrocities (15 million victims in mainland China alone; 1.5 million in Indonesia, and 1 million + in Korea) to the atrocities we're all familiar with in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the Western theater, and the upwards of one million people estimated to have been murdered by Franco, a minor partner in that inglorious alliance. All told, WW2 took up to 50 million souls, 20 million+ in the Soviet Union alone.

Meanwhile, in the Americas, under the longstanding partnership for oppression between Washington and the local comprador elites, Central and South American populations were repressed since the 19th century to the tune of several magnitudes the levels seen in Russia itself, and with a brutality characteristic of right-wing methods. What's more, this well-documented history of collaboration and support for corrupt, murderous elites and corporate collaborators continues to this day, as readers of this list know or should know well. In sum, even a sketchy tally for this period of Fascist-bourgeois repression easily surpasses the crimes both real and imagined imputed to Stalin and his associates, and, mind you, the bourgeois crimes cannot even claim the figleaf of trying to defend a superior social ideal—however derailed— since they're from the start examples of deliberate protection of clearly unjust social orders. (I'm feeling charitable so I won't tally here the victims to colonialism and bourgeois repression engineered since the end of WW2—Vietnam alone saw more than one million of its people killed.)

FALSE EQUATIONS

The problem I have with social democrats and liberals in general— these proponents of the famous "Third Way"— is that, besides the fact it doesn't seem to work, there's also a hard to disguise inability to emotionally and in practice break entirely with capitalism. This rather embarrassing fact does not keep liberals from fully feeling entitled to make facile and insidious equations that ignore the difficulties of building socialism of any kind without deformations in the teeth of brutal and well-funded counter-revolutionary activity. In this, as I have often pointed out, they're cheerfully ahistorical, a trait that may be taken as inevitable among the bourgeois but which is hard to explain among self-professed "leftists".

What equations am I referring to? Minor things like these:

Cuba and Fidel + Sandinistas + Hugo Chavez + Che Guevara, etc = Stalinism and Stalin's Russia

In 2005 it would seem ludicrous if not lunatic to argue that Fidel's Cuba is the equivalent of Stalin's Russia, yet this is the implication—witting or unwitting—of most of the CPD-type agitation. And if putting it in black and white seems odd, it is because it is an odd way of looking at real world politics. In fact, it is also a slanderous way of looking at the Cuban revolution, an insult to the intelligence and probity of millions of Cubans who, after great sacrifices for almost half a century, continue to freely support Fidel as their "líder maximo" —the best politician in the nation.

But keeping track of socdem/liberaloid meanderings is not a task for the faint-hearted. Especially vexing is when this crowd attacks a non-bourgeois regime from a rather schizoid right-wing/leftwing perspective, lending their stamp of credibility to imperialist propaganda (as they are doing now right in regard to Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba). One of their icons and lions, Mexican "socialist" Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda, is happy to serve in the Vicente Fox's rightist administration ("because I was invited"), while developing tender ties with the US State Department and Colin Powell, in particular. Not surprising he has been utilized already to criticize Pres. Hugo Chavez, not to mention Fidel Castro. As they say in the propaganda trade, these are perfect "propaganda mules." Sam Farber, with similar credentials, including the dubious non-fact of "having been born in Cuba" (would you ask Cuban exiles for an opinion on Fidel or former Tsarist supporters for their views on the October revolution? Or the average American for his understanding of US foreign policy? Being born in a given country means next to nothing. You can go in almost any direction.) But why, you may ask, do they straddle at once rightwing and leftwing positions? Because many times they neurotically refuse to support a nation struggling to build a non-capitalist path on account of "insufficient perfection" in the revolutionary process...and...in so doing they end up objectively in the rightwing camp, in the imperial camp, doing the devil's work instead of simply struggling with their co-religionists to finetune and defend the besieged revolution. "Struggle" is a word that sticks in their crow. For the most part, it's too messy and indefinite a process for their tidy minds. Perhaps their posture can be explained by their temperamental inability to put things in perspective, in their proper priority planes; for socdems, and certainly for liberals, all infractions are of the same magnitude and merit the same response. Their analyses inhabit a totally level response plane.

UNCHANGING HISTORY AND HUMAN NATURE

Stalin's dictatorship took place more than 50 years ago. To keep on harping on this is to imply by default that history does not move forward, that nothing changes, that systems do not evolve, and that even redemption is impossible. It's to assume that the easily observable uneven development and political forms encountered in various nations sharing the same system (i.e., capitalist Sweden is different than capitalist Japan, etc.) do not matter or do not exist. This absurdity opens the door to the ahistorical proposition that since Stalin's 1936 Russia was the way it was, today's Cuba must be the same, which is not only an error but in most cases a deliberate and malicious lie. I say this because anyone who knows Cuba well, as it is honestly spelled out in the Richard Levins piece that started some of this melee, must conclude in fairness that Cuba is by no stretch of the imagination a dictatorial regime. Hard to classify, perhaps, but not dictatorial entity, and certainly far more faithful to democratic ideals and popular aspirations than what any welfare capitalist system has ever delivered, taking into account concrete historical circumstances. Let's NOT compare, for example, a fully mature capitalist nation like France or Sweden with Cuba, since the former represent an older capitalist economic system with much more time to develop resources unmolested, a fact most Cubans would envy. Proportion, gentlemen, proportion. Nations must be evaluated against their own potentialities and historical constraints.

Lastly, the notion that a Sam Farber or a Castañeda will remain on the left as genuine leftists (assuming they once were such) is also ahistorical and false. People are free to change, switch sides, and they often do. History offers many examples of people changing colors and allegiances (or hues, if you proclaim to still militate under a certain banner). Such is the case of John Strachey, for example, a creative and erudite interpreter of Marxist thought in the 1930s who gradually "toned down" his fire until he ended up essentially a loyal member of the "respectable left". Strachey published a number of works, including his classic The Coming Struggle for Power (1932), The Nature of Capitalist Crisis (1935), The Theory and Practice of Socialism (1936), and What Are We To Do? (1938)—all works of his Communist period that are worth reading even today. Strachey was a Communist till 1939, when he broke with the party and became a member of Labour. By the time of his death (1963) he had fully rejoined the tacit boundaries observed by his fellow classmembers.

And Strachey is far from unique. Many former leftists—Arthur Koestler, David Horowitz, and more recently Christopher Hitchens, the grandadddy of cynical, foaming-at-the-mouth apostasy, also illustrate the situation well. These folks moved to the right, to the warm and cuddly folds of the bourgeois establishment because they "matured" ( i.e., bought the house with the white picket fence, so to speak), or simply got tired of the frustrating life of living in the social Siberia reserved for unbending oppositionists. Human, you may say, but not admirable.

For further reflection on this topic, I suggest Minqi Li's superb article in Jan. 2004's Monthly Review, "After Neoliberalism: Empire, Social Democracy, or Socialism?"—and, of course, the article that may have detonated this longwinded dialogue, Richard Levins' "Progressive Cuba-Bashing" —

( http://www.cjonline.org/rLevinsCubaBashing.cfm ).

Good night and good luck!

Patrice Greanville

(Just a joke folks, I'm hardly an admirer of Saintly Ed Murrow, a classic liberal pseudo hero for a nation starving for real heroes.)