More from Samuel Farber on Cuba
In Solidarity’s Against the Current:
WHEN IN 1961 Fidel Castro proclaimed “inside the revolution everything; outside the revolution, nothing,” he left out the key question of who decided what was and who qualified as being “inside the revolution.” The slogan was immediately followed by repressive measures directed not against right-wing counterrevolutionaries but against non-Communist leftists.
Lunes de Revolución, the weekly mass circulation literary and political supplement of the government newspaper Revolución, which published a wide variety of non-Communist independent left-wing authors from all over the world, was closed. The documentary titled “PM,” depicting the apolitical pleasure-loving night life of poor people in Havana directed by Saba Cabrera Infante, Guillermo’s brother, who was the editor of Lunes, was also suppressed … READ MORE
– Adrian
A retort from Louis Proyect that I myself don’t subscribe to. http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/samuel-farbers-latest-folly/
Maybe it’s just me, but Farber seems to write the same piece over and over again.
It’s easy to rip to shreds those that think that Cuba is a “workers state”; it’s clearly not by any stretch of the imagination.
I am however a big fan of Pedro Campos Santos, who Farber mentions at the end of this piece.
Sam — a serious scholar with friends in Cuba — wouldn’t have to “write the same piece over and over again” if so much of the U.S. radical left didn’t look at the Fidelista party-state through rose-colored glasses.
Cuba’s undeniable internationalist efforts (including its sheltering of members of the US left in the 1960s), its successes in health and education, the rapid expropriation of its bourgeoisie and its recent support for the global justice movement have all won over large segments of the US left.
The main problem is that these people have totally abandoned any sort of analysis on the basis of class. In the odd “progressive-or-not” dichotomy it’s easy to see why people would be in Cuba’s camp. In reality, the Cuban state and society is fundamentally a class one and conservative. It relies largely on depoliticization, on imagery that shrouds itself and earns its legitimacy from the past (revolutionary icons, Marti) and it uses repressive mechanisms to prevent any struggle, polticization and evolution.
When the Castro clique came to power it shrouded itself in a hyper-masculine, psuedo-fascist veneer. (I might actually be understating the fascist ethos of the Cuban Revolution).
That being said if I have to lend my voice to criticizing Cuba from afar it’ll a critique of the class nature of Cuban society and a criticism along the same lines as Pedro Camps Santos.
Fascist ethos? Sounds like what I used to hear in the 1960s when SDS called Nixon a fascist. In fact everything and everybody was a fascist back then, including people who had short hair and listened to Merle Haggard records. In terms of Marxism, I think you have to do better, Bhaskar.
It does sound a bit glib. I’ll write something on the subject in a longer form one day.
God, I love Merle Haggard.