Ian Boyne, Contributor
CUBA HAS earned the wrath and denunciation of even left-wing sympathisers because of its rapid execution recently of three persons who attempted to hijack a boat and its imprisonment of 75 dissidents including journalists, some of whom have been given as many as 28 years.
A distinguished group of intellectuals and political activists, including Noam Chomsky, Immanuel Wallerstein, Alan Sokal, Stanley Aronwitz and Robert Brenner who are part of a group named the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, issued a statement trouncing the Castro regime for its repressive actions. This group had forcefully opposed the United States intervention in Iraq and had taken out ads in the New York Times, the Nation, the Progressive and Boston Review to make its voice heard.
The group notes that the Cuban authorities have accused the dissidents of collaborating with US diplomats to undermine the Cuban state and for receiving American Government funds. But, they say that one reason dissidents turn to the US for help is that they are denied the basic tools facilitating free expression, such as computers, copying machines and printers.
Further, the group argue that dissidents who believe that the United States is genuinely interested in political and social democracy in Cuba are "terribly mistaken". Accordingly, they posit Washington is merely interested in "reconstructing a society of private wealth and privilege and in promoting a conservative, and probably repressive pro-US Government in Havana". Despite these views, the group also rejected Cuba's suppression of civil liberties.
"This political problem no way justifies repression. Right wing politics and support for the US in Cuba cannot be countered by censorship and imprisonment. Neither the Cuban Government nor any other Government has the right to stifle or obstruct free expression of opinions, no matter how repellant or misguided we think they might be."
This is a fundamental statement of principle and it also represents a philosophical position which separates the defence of civil and political liberties from Western capitalism. There has been a tendency among the left to scorn liberal democratic principles, with many often dismissing them as 'bourgeois' and 'capitalistic'. It is time that we stop giving dictators, irrespective of how benign, the cover of anti-capitalism or, more particularly, anti-Americanism to shield their totalitarian instincts and practices.
SIDESTEPPING THE ISSUE
Another thing we must not do is to answer the charge that Cuba is repressive, undemocratic and authoritarian by pointing to the host of truly impressive social and cultural progress which has been made under Castro. It is time that esteemed journalists like John Maxwell stop sidestepping the issue of Cuba's suppression of freedom of the press and repression of journalists by referring to the plethora of genuinely commendable achievements in health, education and other aspects of social welfare.
Maxwell in a Sunday Observer column of May 4 ('The US is spooked by Cuba') regales the usual chorus of praise for the Cuban revolutionary struggle and its outstanding achievements in the face of a US embargo, and could not find it in him to clearly and unequivocally condemn the anti-humanitarian and cultic strike against those who dared to disagree with the regime, including fellow journalists.
I criticise Maxwell with extreme reluctance: Not only because he is one of the most cosmopolitan and widely-read journalists, but also because he is my mentor. Pardon this bit of personal history, but my obsession with encyclopaedic knowledge and my omnivorous reading came partly from the influence of John Maxwell, who took me under his wings when I was a teenager. I always wanted to be as knowledgeable as he was. I will never repay him for the early years of friendship and nurturing. He opened the door for my first significant job at the then Agency for Public Information (now JIS) in 1976, an opportunity which has led to other lucrative openings. I must maintain deference for my journalistic father, but I am forced to say to him and to others on the left, stop cuddling Cuba!
ATTACK REPRESSION
Let's be consistent and attack repression and the crushing of freedom of expression wherever it occurs. Focusing on American aggression, American misdeeds (which are many) and American hypocrisy, which is palpable, is to engage in blindsiding. Saying that journalistic freedom is not absolute in the United States and that the Bush administration has taken bold steps against freedom of expression which is true is not to mitigate to one iota the authoritarian, anti-democratic actions of the Castro government.
Telling us how Cuba treats children and how well it educates its masses, unlike many of our capitalist societies, is to trivialise human freedom and dignity and to make light of what it is that essentially defines our humanity.
Feeding, clothing and ensuring our healthy living which is admittedly more than what most capitalist societies do for the masses falls short of humanising us. No matter what is done for humans, if they don't have the right to make basic decisions, to express dissent and to choose their Governments or to publish ideas against their Governments they are robbed of their essential humanity. Freedom of expression with the freedom to make wrong decisions is essential to human dignity. The Castro Government destroys human dignity every day when it does not allow an independent press.
There are people who treat their dogs better than they treat people. Giving animals the best of food, recreation, health facilities and the most comfortable living conditions is not making them human. Being human means being able to think, plan and chart your own course. An independent press is essential to the exercise of democratic rights. We must stop making excuses for Cuba and not take our aversion to American hypocrisy and double standards so far that we ignore the evils of the Cuban regime. Let's adopt a plague-on-both-your-houses approach, I respectfully submit, John.
REVOLTING
Every journalist should come out against the recent occurrences, just as every journalist should have raised an alarm as Maxwell did so brilliantly and so masterfully against the American unilateralist adventure in Iraq. We must attack injustice everywhere.
"I am personally an admirer of Cuba, an unabashed admirer," John Maxwell confesses in his May 4 column. But you must never allow your admiration for a country, institution or person to blind you to the weaknesses, or what is deplorable. That is to abandon a cardinal principle of journalism which is fairness and a commitment to truth.
The paternalism of the Cuban socialist regime is revolting and demeaning. Paternalism, well-meaning by its nature, is nevertheless unacceptable. Human beings deserve to be treated with dignity. The well-known former Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner, the father of behaviourism, came out in the 1970s with his well-known, path-breaking work Beyond Freedom and Dignity. He theorised that human beings are beyond freedom and dignity or that freedom and dignity have to be defined for them by others their betters, the social engineers, the Enlightened Ones who know what is really in their interest. Deterministic ideologies like Marxism hold precisely the same view of human beings. Communism was not just a disastrous economic and political system, it was even more and primarily a disastrous and scandalous political philosophy.
In a recent issue of the progressive American weekly The Nation, a group of left-wing women signed a statement denouncing the recent attacks on freedom of expression in Cuba. They say rightly: "The only conclusion that we can draw from this brute repression is that the Cuban Government does not trust the Cuban people to distinguish truth from falsehood, fact from disinformation." But, continues this group of progressive women: "A Government of the left must have the support of the people: It must guarantee human rights and champion the widest possible democracy, including the right to dissent."
Feeding, clothing, housing, entertaining and making healthy a people is not humanising them. Many governments have used the matter of external threats to justify repression and the clamping down on human rights. Latin American 'security states' have made an art of that and so have other governments around the world, including the United States.
The former American diplomat to Havana, Wayne Smith, a Cuban sympathiser, has also come out against the recent attacks on journalists and other dissidents. He notes that US Interests Section head, James Carson, has been behaving very undiplomatic and, in my view, clearly unprincipled in Havana, with Carson's openly announcing that his purpose is to help promote a "transition to a participatory form of Government". If Syrian diplomats were openly organising with dissident Americans to bring Islamic revolution to the United States, Homeland Security and the Attorney-General might not be sitting idly by. But that is no argument to justify the repressive and criminal action against non-violent dissidents in Cuba, including librarians.
FREEDOM
How can people like John Maxwell remain silent or merely crow about Cuban social achievements when the Cuban dictatorship confiscates the books, newsletters, videocassettes, video recorders and laptop computers of the Cuban people if the authorities suspect they are being used for 'counter-revolutionary propaganda'?
A most ingenious and indeed sophisticated philosophical attempt at justification for Cuban intellectual terror is given by Susan Babbitt in the inaugural issue of the Journal of African Philosophy (2002). She attacks left-wing people who criticise Cuba for lack of press freedom and liberal democracy and musters erudite philosophical arguments to show that they have uncritically accepted the Western liberal democratic tradition. The argument is this: Who says that it is only when people choose their own interests that they are truly free? And who says people freely choose anything anyway?
She writes: "We assume, following Mill, that it is better for people to act on their own values, whatever these are, as long as they are carefully thought out and sufficiently well-informed." This is her rationalisation for paternalism: "If I come across someone about to step onto a bridge which I know to be broken, I will intervene and prevent that person from doing as he intended to do. I can justify my action, however, on the grounds that if the person did know that if the bridge would not hold his weight, he himself would have decided not to step onto it. In other words, I would take my intervention to be justified on the grounds that the person himself would have done as I did only if he had been properly informed."
So if I prevent the masses from being brainwashed by American consumerist propaganda, that only creates false needs and false consciousness and that would lead them to social and political hell which is not in their interest then I am acting in their interests even though they don't know it. This assumes that I know the Truth, that my metanarrative and Grand Theory is the only correct one; that I objectively know what is right and I can't brook any relativism. The founders of the American Constitution held to a fallibilist view of knowledge: they believed we had no way of knowing that we really know what was right; that human beings were fallible, often mistaken and prone to selfishness. Because of that there needed to be checks and balances and a variety of perspectives. There needed to be the cut and thrust of debate, dissent and bargaining until our finite, fallible positions can be compared.
The repression in Cuban is not incidental. It is deeply rooted in a philosophical fundamentalism that cannot square with actual, fallible human experience. An admirer like John Maxwell, who revels in dissent in Jamaica and bemoans its lack in the American media, tolerates its absence in Cuba. Above all, he is deafeningly silent about its repression in Cuba, land he loves.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist.E-mail: ianboyne@hotmail.com.
