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American democrazy
Patrick Wilmot
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Patrick Wilmot
It was ironic that a State Department official (Thomas Shannon, Jr - "Cuba's future" in the Observer of December 27) gave a lecture on democracy to a country whose aircraft the CIA destroyed in 1976 to destabilise the governments of Jamaica and Cuba. Luis Posada Carriles, the Cuban exile who murdered 73 passengers, killed many others for democrazy in Latin America and now lives in comfort in Miami, where election officials rigged it for Bush in 2000.
Whatever the Americans and some wealthy Jamaicans thought of the Manley government, it had been elected by the people. There was no need to subject Jamaicans to the economic warfare from which they have still not recovered. If the Americans were afraid of the schools, clinics and dams the Cubans were building, they could have built even more, since they were richer.
Manley was trying to solve the central problem of Jamaica, the poverty of the majority which explains the horrific levels of crime and suffering in this island "paradise". Whether he was succeeding, the fact is that poverty has got much worse in the past 30 years. The economic doctrine imposed by America and its friends widened the gap between rich and poor so the rich in Stony Hill drive bigger SUVs while the poor in "Tel Aviv" look for larger calibre automatic rifles.
In most countries thieves snatch goods and try to avoid contact with householders or police. In Jamaica thieves go out to murder with burglary as an afterthought. The few middle-class Jamaicans who venture into the ghettoes understand what Dante meant when he told the hell-bound to "abandon hope all ye who enter here". When I was a boy it was possible to get out of "downtown" through education and hard work. Thanks to the American-style democrazy of our politricians, you cannot get out now without an M16 or Uzi, brought in from the democratic USA.
Mr Shannon's main beef was with Cuba's lack of democrazy. But despite its poverty and brutal American economic sabotage, the average Cuban enjoys a much better quality of life than the average Jamaican. For centuries Cuba suffered the ravages of American businessmen and gangsters. Its citizens were treated like slaves and its women as prostitutes. Before Castro came to power the island was run by Batista, a brutal dictator, which was okay for democrazy as he was "our son of a [censored]". And the Mafia had the democratic rights to operate casinos and brothels. I can't recall a single State Department official complaining about democracy or political prisoners then.
The victorious Cuban revolutionaries were not a monolithic force of hardened communists. Unlike Guevara and Raoul Castro who were party members, Fidel and most of the leadership were not. As a freshman I spent the Christmas holidays with a classmate in Boston near the Kennedy compound and dated a student from Radcliff, then a women's college at Harvard. Her father was a Harvard Professor who advised the American government.
She told me that Fidel Castro had had secret meetings with Vice President Nixon to discuss peaceful change in his country. He explained that he was unwilling to follow the hard line of some of his comrades who wanted to confront the US by nationalising all its businesses. His programme, for which he sought American support, was land reform, the distribution of millions of hectares of unused land owned by companies like United Fruit; the shutdown of casinos and brothels and the expulsion of the Mafia, many of whom were wanted in the USA; and the payment to Cuba of taxes by American corporations.
Those who have heard the Nixon tapes know what a foul-mouthed scum that president was. But that was before Watergate and I was sceptical about some of the expletives my friend said Nixon used on Fidel. The result was that instead of the mild Social Democracy as practised by most of America's developed allies, Cuba became communist. Even then Cuban communism was nothing like Russia's - it was closer to China's even though far more relaxed. It was America's threat to invade Cuba, which it did so many times in the past, that pushed the Castro government into the arms of Russia.
Despite its lack of democrazy the Cubans have never tried to assassinate any American president, or even the anti-Castro terrorists trained by the US in Florida. Cuba's secret services could have executed the exile who blew up the Cubana airline. But it was the "democratic" USA which spent billions on hundreds of assassination plots against the Cuban president. They have not succeeded but they did kill Arbenz, Allende, Mossadegh, Lumumba, Murtala Muhammed, and hundreds of others who made the fatal error of thinking "democracy" meant serving the interests of their own people.
Patrick Wilmot is visiting professor at three Nigerian universities and is the author of Seeing Double. He writes out of London.
Patrick Wilmot
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Patrick Wilmot
It was ironic that a State Department official (Thomas Shannon, Jr - "Cuba's future" in the Observer of December 27) gave a lecture on democracy to a country whose aircraft the CIA destroyed in 1976 to destabilise the governments of Jamaica and Cuba. Luis Posada Carriles, the Cuban exile who murdered 73 passengers, killed many others for democrazy in Latin America and now lives in comfort in Miami, where election officials rigged it for Bush in 2000.
Whatever the Americans and some wealthy Jamaicans thought of the Manley government, it had been elected by the people. There was no need to subject Jamaicans to the economic warfare from which they have still not recovered. If the Americans were afraid of the schools, clinics and dams the Cubans were building, they could have built even more, since they were richer.
Manley was trying to solve the central problem of Jamaica, the poverty of the majority which explains the horrific levels of crime and suffering in this island "paradise". Whether he was succeeding, the fact is that poverty has got much worse in the past 30 years. The economic doctrine imposed by America and its friends widened the gap between rich and poor so the rich in Stony Hill drive bigger SUVs while the poor in "Tel Aviv" look for larger calibre automatic rifles.
In most countries thieves snatch goods and try to avoid contact with householders or police. In Jamaica thieves go out to murder with burglary as an afterthought. The few middle-class Jamaicans who venture into the ghettoes understand what Dante meant when he told the hell-bound to "abandon hope all ye who enter here". When I was a boy it was possible to get out of "downtown" through education and hard work. Thanks to the American-style democrazy of our politricians, you cannot get out now without an M16 or Uzi, brought in from the democratic USA.
Mr Shannon's main beef was with Cuba's lack of democrazy. But despite its poverty and brutal American economic sabotage, the average Cuban enjoys a much better quality of life than the average Jamaican. For centuries Cuba suffered the ravages of American businessmen and gangsters. Its citizens were treated like slaves and its women as prostitutes. Before Castro came to power the island was run by Batista, a brutal dictator, which was okay for democrazy as he was "our son of a [censored]". And the Mafia had the democratic rights to operate casinos and brothels. I can't recall a single State Department official complaining about democracy or political prisoners then.
The victorious Cuban revolutionaries were not a monolithic force of hardened communists. Unlike Guevara and Raoul Castro who were party members, Fidel and most of the leadership were not. As a freshman I spent the Christmas holidays with a classmate in Boston near the Kennedy compound and dated a student from Radcliff, then a women's college at Harvard. Her father was a Harvard Professor who advised the American government.
She told me that Fidel Castro had had secret meetings with Vice President Nixon to discuss peaceful change in his country. He explained that he was unwilling to follow the hard line of some of his comrades who wanted to confront the US by nationalising all its businesses. His programme, for which he sought American support, was land reform, the distribution of millions of hectares of unused land owned by companies like United Fruit; the shutdown of casinos and brothels and the expulsion of the Mafia, many of whom were wanted in the USA; and the payment to Cuba of taxes by American corporations.
Those who have heard the Nixon tapes know what a foul-mouthed scum that president was. But that was before Watergate and I was sceptical about some of the expletives my friend said Nixon used on Fidel. The result was that instead of the mild Social Democracy as practised by most of America's developed allies, Cuba became communist. Even then Cuban communism was nothing like Russia's - it was closer to China's even though far more relaxed. It was America's threat to invade Cuba, which it did so many times in the past, that pushed the Castro government into the arms of Russia.
Despite its lack of democrazy the Cubans have never tried to assassinate any American president, or even the anti-Castro terrorists trained by the US in Florida. Cuba's secret services could have executed the exile who blew up the Cubana airline. But it was the "democratic" USA which spent billions on hundreds of assassination plots against the Cuban president. They have not succeeded but they did kill Arbenz, Allende, Mossadegh, Lumumba, Murtala Muhammed, and hundreds of others who made the fatal error of thinking "democracy" meant serving the interests of their own people.
Patrick Wilmot is visiting professor at three Nigerian universities and is the author of Seeing Double. He writes out of London.