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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Rundle takes a far more supportive stance:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2016/11/28/rundle-obit-for-castro/
| Quote: | Well, 2016 really is determined to be a clearing-house of modernity, aint it? The death of Fidel Castro at the age of 90 is being taken as an opportunity for all sorts of positionings, most of them absurdly self-serving. The US right-wing efforts are particularly remarkable, since theyre all from fundamentalist Christians who believe that he is now literally in hell, being prodded with pitchforks. Their glee is all a little post-hoc. Castro retired from power a decade ago, an event that right-wing Cuba-watchers assured us would occasion a rising in the streets. It didnt happen then, and what was hoped for, the great repudiation, has still not occurred.
But Castros longevity has been as inconvenient to those from his side of politics as for his enemies. He survived 60 years past the revolution he led, 25 years past the collapse of the USSR, still lucid, still commenting furiously. It is as if Lenin had lived into the 1970s, to give his views on Woodstock and the Sex Pistols. That survival, and his intractability on political strategy and state socialism, might not only have kept Cuba stuck in a minimal transition to a mixed economy, it made a historical reckoning with his rule and life something a lot of people were unwilling to do. Thirty, even 20 years ago, a lot of people, even his enemies, were more willing to concede some points to the Cuban revolution; now, many, including its friends, are rushing to judge it without any context.
Lets consider that context. From the late 1940s, Latin America had been caught up in a ferment, as various nations tried to throw off dominance by US imperialism and local dictatorship, enforcing the power of landed families and American corporations to deny the most basic rights and reforms lethal arrangements that had kept people poor, illiterate and powerless, enforced by repeated US invasions and occupations from 1898 onwards. In 1951, in Guatemala, a reformist government headed by Jacobo Arbenz enacted a large land reform program, distributing locked-up lands to peasants, allowing them to become small farmers. For this, at the behest of the US United Fruit Corporation, the US government and CIA fomented and backed a coup detat, which plunged the country into a half-century of repression, civil war and indigenous genocide that would eventually claim 250,000 lives.
Significantly, at the time, it told supporters of Arbenz, such as Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara, that the US would not permit even mild reformism the same lesson the Bolsheviks had taken from the brutal repression of the 1871 Paris Commune. Any chance of escaping a global system of imperialism and underdevelopment would require a full defence. As night descended on Latin America, and US backed death squads spread out to wipe out whole classes of people teachers, union leaders who might form some resistance, it became clear that the US plan was to keep the region in a permanent state of subjection. The Latin American left tilted towards Marxist analysis and strategy.
The Cuban revolution was part of that, and part of the global uprising against the extension of US imperialism. The revolutionaries saw the imposition of global capitalism as involving the imposition of permanent underdevelopment as agrarian producers of cheap raw materials, making just enough to serve as a market for US industrial goods, without competing against them and had become insistent on this point in 1953-54, with the Arbenz overthrow, the coup in Iran, and the installation of the Shah, and the creation of the puppet state of South Vietnam, after the French had been defeated.
The Cuban regime was, thus, as brutal towards its enemies as it felt it needed to be to survive and far less brutal than many of the US-backed regimes that surrounded it. The resistance it led was against a real enemy, and it extended that resistance with the creation of the Cuban brigades, sent into Africa in the mid-1970s, when South Africa sought to extend its power over the whole of southern Africa. The pressure Cuba put on the apartheid regime was essential to frustrating its plans to dominate the region, and to the ending of apartheid itself.
When the Cold War was over, the foreign brigades were replaced with medical brigades, who brought healthcare to countries whose healthcare systems had been devastated by the imposed austerity of the International Monetary Fund. These alone have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Cuba sends doctors to Pacific island nations, while we turn them into client-state prisons. They were going into West Africa during the recent Ebola crisis, while everyone else was rushing out. The commitment of their participants comes from a genuine socialist-humanist ethic that the regimes existence has fostered.
But thats really the context in which Cuba has to be understood. The Cold War in the Third World wasnt a fight between democracy and communism; it was between imperialism and self-determination. The imperialism offered was murderous beyond all imagining; 200,000 dead in Guatemala, more in El Salvador and elsewhere, 3 million to 5 million in Indochina, three-quarters of a million in Indonesia, half a million in Iraq (the last, or latest, act of the 50s Iran coup). Add to that the lives blighted by lack of schooling, unionisation, medical care, and then by the imposition of the Washington consensus debt bomb in the 80s and 90s, which drained local budgets of hundreds of billions, and the human toll is vast. It would have been unimaginable without resistance, and victory against it.
Imperialism had no inherent use-by date, by which it would simply wither away. What imperialism had in mind for the 20th century was an imperial apartheid planet, ticking over indefinitely. If you find that unimaginable, thank a Third World revolutionary. (And its the moment for my annual reminder that the funds for the CIA wing of such operations came from the same place as did the funds for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which funded magazines such as Quadrant, whose then-editor Peter Coleman, now claims the virtue of having been on the right side. Tell it to the dead, Peter. The money came from the same place that paid your salary).
What Cuba provided was not merely actual resistance, but a demonstration that it was possible for small nations to defeat the beast. More than 1949 in China a country no imperialist power has ever been able to fully swallow Cuba showed the power of audacity. With US state connivance, the Mafia were busy turning it into a gangster client state. Recent stuff about its economic growth in the 1950s are the usual use of aggregate statistics to obscure winners and losers the latter being almost everyone.
So, the judgement against the Cuban revolution itself, its bloody aftermath, and its subsequent lock-down is absurd if it does not occur in the context of this history. Or the effect of a decades-long blockade whose effect, once overstated, now appears forgotten. Or the Missile Crisis, in which the US had missiles based in Turkey, on the USSR border, but objected to any on its own front step.
That Cuban Leninism continued decades beyond any justification, even on its own terms, is without question. That this resulted from the political structure it imposed, which facilitated Castros arrogance and intransigence is not contested. Nor are the particular crimes of a certain left puritan machismo: the persecution of homosexuals and prostitutes, in the early years. But equally absurd are the comparisons, in which Cuba is slated for not being Massachusetts or Denmark. Try comparing Cuba and Haiti. Or the Dominican Republic. Or anywhere where capricious death and misery without cease stalks life.
So Fidel lived long enough for the judgement passed on his life to be one that excluded all that had served as the context of his acts. To argue against the current celebration of global capitalism and wealth creation is hard enough, but it is nearly impossible to remind people that there was a period, from 1949 into the 1970s, when millions worked to create a way in which humanity could rise itself up, without turning the world into a giant knock-off handbag factory/call centre.
Memory of that time will come again, and soon, because the liberal capitalism that announced its triumph less than 20 years ago is now in crisis. The initial beneficiaries in the West have been the right and note how willing the champions of small government, sound budgeting, etc, are to sign up with the incoming Donald Trump administration whose Breitbart faction proposes a $1 trillion state infrastructure spending program, funded by borrowing. Much of it will be a rort, but its announcement marks the death of the legitimacy of liberal capitalism.
But those are desperate measures against a global process that is setting the system against the people. Its a measure of the times that much of the criticism of Castros regime at the moment centres on its persecution of homosexuals in the 60s and beyond a ghastly episode, and for which Castro later apologised. This was ignored for too long by a left focused on the economic and geopolitical question. Now the latter have been relatively forgotten. They will return, I think, as the deep problems of global capitalism spread permanent low growth, falling wage power, decaying social mobility, increasing public squalor. Sooner rather than later, the excluded will be so numerous, so under the thumb, so lacking in prospect, that interest in organised and militant political movement one unified by notions of universality rather than divided by the media class brand-builders of the new identity politics will reoccur. Will it look like Castro-ism? Of course not. State socialism has been dead as a strategy for 40 years. The right is celebrating the victory of one track-suited old dude in Havana, whose revolution was won a half-century ago. Some victory. Capitalism triumphant? Lets wait and si. |
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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watt price tully 
Joined: 15 May 2007
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| David wrote: | Rundle takes a far more supportive stance:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2016/11/28/rundle-obit-for-castro/
| Quote: | Well, 2016 really is determined to be a clearing-house of modernity, aint it? The death of Fidel Castro at the age of 90 is being taken as an opportunity for all sorts of positionings, most of them absurdly self-serving. The US right-wing efforts are particularly remarkable, since theyre all from fundamentalist Christians who believe that he is now literally in hell, being prodded with pitchforks. Their glee is all a little post-hoc. Castro retired from power a decade ago, an event that right-wing Cuba-watchers assured us would occasion a rising in the streets. It didnt happen then, and what was hoped for, the great repudiation, has still not occurred.
...... Lets wait and si. |
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Great read & one of the more sober articles by Rundle. Why? Because I agree with it 
_________________
“I even went as far as becoming a Southern Baptist until I realised they didn’t keep ‘em under long enough” Kinky Friedman |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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According to some, the only reason he lived so long is the Devil had been expecting him in hell for a while and wanted to shore up his defences against another takeover before he arrived.
What's with all the rhetoric about anti US rule? The US "liberated" Cuba from the Spanish and only had control for 2 years before handing it over to Cuba. Castrol deposed a dictator and became a possibly worse one himself. Free education and health care are nice things but would possibly be better if the population had things like food, sewerage, medicine and electricity
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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| It's lucky that the US has a strict, unvarying policy of never, ever interfering in the internal affairs of other countries. Without that, who knows what might have happened in Iran, Cuba, Vietnam and Korea? |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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Rundown applies the notion of context rightly to the time. Unfortunately he neglects to mention that the geopolitical context included a face-off between one of the most carnivorous, vicious and murderous imperialist powers the world has ever seen, on one hand, and the democratic world on the other.
The US supported some very unlovely regimes in the process, of that there is no doubt. Even today it is hard to tell which battles really needed to be fought in a life and death struggle with one of the most transparently wicked and lying despotisms ever to disgrace the planet. I'm sure it was even harder to find nice guys to stand against Soviet proxies in 1960. In Latin America you don't always get to choose a West Germany.
Still, yes, tell it to the dead as Rundown says - but when you are explaining context, forget the embarrassing corpses of history like the 10m dead of Ukraine and the gulags, forget North Korea (originally a Russian satellite before it became a Chinese one) forget Hungary and East Berlin and Prague. Only some contexts deserve a mention, it seems, when you are desperate to defend a grotesquely failed old Marxist who has set his country back 50 years.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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| I'm not sure that it's quite fair to describe the US in such negative terms - "murderous imperialists" is probably sufficient, in this context. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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^ Actually, most of the responses so far have been pretty measured, I reckon neither effusive in praise nor damning Castro to hell. What would you make of his legacy?
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ if you mean my post David, I said it above. A man who had some good intentions and potential early which were destroyed by his egotism. Whether that egotism was a cause or consequence of his adherence to the failed ideology of Marxism is perhaps the only interesting question at this point. What I objected to in Rundle's article was the idea that Castro was excused by his context but the US was not. That's the old pro-Soviet equivalence argument. You don't hear it much nowadays but it was popular in the 1980s, usually in countries that were lucky enough to live under US military guarantees and thus safe from soviet or Chinese Communism. People usually hate those to whom they secretly fear they owe a debt of gratitude.
It was an ugly time and ugly things were done. Even if cold, it was a war that had to be won. Wars with Creeds like Sovietism are not fought like general elections. At this point it is right to explore where the US acted with cruelty that was not necessary. But the enemy was great, and seemed more dangerous at that time than it probably was hindsight.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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That was a question to PTID, Mugwump!
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| David wrote: | | ^ Actually, most of the responses so far have been pretty measured, I reckon neither effusive in praise nor damning Castro to hell. What would you make of his legacy? |
Which is probably a euphemism for saying it's so contingent on so much we're so removed from, and buried under so much propaganda, there's nothing clear to say aside from the agreed basic facts. Put it this way, have you ever met anyone who wasn't repeating received reading or pop discourse on the topic, or running trivial calculations off those?
It seems to be one of the classic topics that everyone has an opinion on, but no one has a serious contextual, grounded understanding of. Thus, Mary says x and Fred reacts with not x, causing Jane to propose x/2 and Mary to double-down with 2x.
Okay, there will be some great tomes out there on the matter, to be sure. But I have grave doubts even they can get us much closer with topics like this which are so deeply embedded in so many layers of crap.
Consider, five minutes ago, just down the road, Germany was supposedly collapsing into the sea under the weight of raping and pillaging refugees. Now, multiply that distortion field by a factor sufficient to offset the distance and motivated reasoning in this instance, and you wonder why we bother.
Actually, I suspect we bother in order to convince ourselves we have a handle on things, thus boosting our imagined self efficacy and soothing our anxieties, much as an addictive drug might.
Bearing that in mind, I honestly don't know what to think.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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^
I agree with a lot of what you said about people's opinions and how they're formed.
Personally, having done a little reading over the last few days (thus supporting your hypothesis ) I'd say the balance weighs fairly heavily in the negative.
Whatever good anyone can argue he achieved, he ran a classic socialist dictatorship.
1. Take power and hold on and all costs, tick.
2. Take over the media and suppress information, tick.
3, Imprison and/or kill people who disagree with you or who you don't like, tick
4. The general populace lives in relative poverty with the basics of life (food, medicine, freedom) rationed or in short supply.
You could line him up against Mugabe, and while Mugabe wins the gold as the bigger outright despot, Fidel is in the photo.
His regime is yet further proof that socialism or communism, whatever label you want to attach to it, just does not work no matter how attractive some find it conceptually.
I said to someone yesterday in a work setting, if you need to attend training to be able to fill in a form, the form is too complicated.
Likewise, if you need a dictatorship that brooks no dissent to preside over a political system, the political system doesn't work.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Can't disagree with that last sentence.
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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Yes, that last sentence gets to the heart of the matter; we can imagine almost any counterfactual people care to name.
Saddam Hussein being preferable to ISIS is an example of how relative and contextual and futile this can become.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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