Guest Column
When Repression Masquerades as Social Justice:
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When Repression
Masquerades as Social Justice: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
By Carlos Eire
Foreign Policy Research Institute
As Elie Wiesel reminds us, there is no more eloquent witness
against injustice and evil than eyewitness memory. A
colleague of mine at Yale, the theologian Miroslav Volf, who
spent time in prison in Croatia simply because his father
was a Protestant minister, has argued that evil can triumph
multiple times: first when an injustice is committed, and
over and over if the record of that injustice is wiped out
and the memory of it denied.[1]
In 1959, when Fidel Castro took power, the population of
Cuba was only 6 million. But except for the scale, life
there was much like it was in the Soviet Union. Imagine
having lived in a repressive state, and then from the moment
you reach the United States constantly being told what a
wonderful place you came from and how wonderful the Castro
revolution has been to your people. Imagine being told
constantly--sometimes directly, sometimes insinuated--that
you are simply selfish, you didn't want to share your
property with other people, and that's why you are here.
That's my story and why I wrote my memoir. I face this every
day still, even recently at the UN, because I come not from
Europe but from the "third world."
CUBAN HISTORY
Cuba was a Spanish colony until 1898, when the Spanish-
American war freed Cuba from Spain. In 1898, the population
of Cuba was 2 million; slavery had existed until 1888.
Cubans had been fighting against Spain unsuccessfully for
forty years, but in 1898 the U.S. marched in and took over.
In 1902, the U.S. granted independence to Cuba (which it did
not do for the Philippines and Puerto Rico, the other two
colonies it won from Spain). Cuba got its own constitution,
but under the Platt amendment, the U.S. had the right to
intervene in Cuban affairs any time it felt its interests
were threatened.
Cuba's first president, Tomas Estrada Palma, had spent most
of his adult life in the U.S., teaching at Hobart and
William Smith Colleges in New York state. Between 1902-52,
the U.S. intervened directly and indirectly numerous times,
removing presidents and ensuring that other presidents were
installed.
Between 1900-30, one million European immigrants arrived in
Cuba, completely changing the island. Contrary to prevailing
myths, the country was not quite a third world country in
1959. In fact, at that time, it had more college-educated
women than the U.S. per capita. It had more TV sets than all
of Italy. It had a very prosperous economy and a huge middle
class. Yes, there was poverty, but the country also had a
high literacy rate and a liberal 1940 constitution. But
unfortunately, the country was politically immature,
subjected to one dictatorship after another and a great deal
of corruption.
In 1952, an army coup brought to power Fulgencio Batista,
who ruled with an iron fist. He made sure that the
opposition met its end very quickly. But there was a degree
of press freedom. Cuba had several TV stations, more than 80
radio stations, and more than 60 newspapers. There was
censorship, but it was not extreme. You simply could not say
anything contrary to Batista's regime. Castro took on
Batista, beat him, and succeeded him, but his was only one
of 17 different revolutionary groups fighting against
Batista. The first thing Castro did when he marched into
Havana was to ensure that these other revolutionaries
quickly disappeared. By 1960, he was expropriating American
property and foreign investments and also beginning to
abolish private property. Before long he had declared Cuba a
Marxist-Leninist state.
From the beginning there were opponents of the regime, even
among men close to Castro who had fought with him. But
promised elections were never held, and people kept
disappearing. There were already exiles in 1960, and the CIA
decided to help them invade Cuba. While the vast majority of
the men who landed in the Bay of Pigs invasion had fought
against Batista, they were not there to reinstate Batista,
but to fight what they had been fighting against since the
mid 1950s. Castro had coopted the revolution, and from day
one spoke for the entire Cuban people. Anyone who did not
agree with him was no longer part of the Cuban people. They
were worms, gusanos. Many of the Cubans who were concerned
with the way the revolution was going assumed that it
wouldn't last long, given the long history of U.S.
involvement in Cuba.
By 1961, there was a Committee for the Defense of the
Revolution (CDR) on every city block--citizens who would spy
on their neighbors, distribute ration cards, and handle
petitions for promotion or for higher education. CDR members
got the most rations. All school-aged children were
"requested" to perform "volunteer labor" for six weeks each
summer, laboring in the countryside for no pay, in living
conditions worse than those of any sweat shop in the Western
world, with terrible food and no contact with their parents.
(This continues today.) Beginning around 1960, many parents
became concerned about their children's future. Men and
women who opposed the Castro regime wanted desperately to
get their children out of Cuba. So the State Department and
the CIA devised a plan to grant the children visa waivers,
since children did not need security clearances. The State
Department gave carte blanche to three Cubans in Havana to
print up visa waivers on a mimeograph machine in a house
that was directly across the street from the G2, Castro's
secret police.
But Cubans are very neighborly. Mothers began to share this
information, and before you knew it, purely by word of
mouth, news of the program had spread like wildfire. Women--
it was only the mother--were flocking to this house. The G2
inquired why so many people were visiting the house and was
told it was a canasta tournament. Between 1960-62, 14,600
children were airlifted to the U.S. I was one of them. My
parents put me on a plane with my brother and sent us to the
U.S. We had no family here, and my parents didn't know where
we'd end up or if we would ever see each other again. But
they were willing to do that. As it turned out, I never saw
my father again after April 6, 1962. The regime would not
allow him to leave. Families were separated continually. If
the family applied for an exit permit, the father would be
fired from his job and sent to perform slave labor in the
countryside for an indefinite period of time, "until you've
paid off your debt to the revolution."
When the missile crisis almost brought the world to an end
in October 1962, Cuba sealed its borders. This meant that
the parents of over 10,000 of us children were stranded in
Cuba. And yet years later, in November 1999, when five-year-
old Elian Gonzales was rescued from the waters off of
Florida, the Cuban government insisted that he be returned
to Cuba because "every boy deserves to be with his father."
Between 1962 and 1976, when my father died, the longest
conversation I ever had with him was three minutes, the
limit on the length of calls, with someone else listening in
on the Cuban end, laughing, making snide remarks, and
calling us worms.
My brother and I were separated once we got to the U.S.
Eventually we found our way back together in a home for
juvenile delinquents and spent nine months there, not
because we had done anything wrong but because that was the
only place for us. Three and a half years later our mother
was able to leave through Mexico. She knew someone who knew
someone who knew someone at the embassy there. But twice
before that, she had her exit permit, made it to the
airport, and was sent back home, told to reapply, because
her seat was needed for someone more important.
The Gonzales case moved me to write my memoir. Over decades
I had written on my Yale University stationery to
practically every major publication in the U.S. asking them
to do a story on the airlift and the way the Cuban
government had split families up, and got not one
acknowledgment. So for four months in the summer of 2000
every night I wrote at my life story. Simon & Schuster
agreed to publish it, but not as a novel, as I had submitted
it. They found it out as true and insisted that it be
published as a memoir.
Man does not live by bread alone; truth is more important
than bread. I wrote the book because of the countless times
even highly educated people tell me that in the third world
"human rights" means something completely different, that
there it is a full plate of food. One college honor student
who had been to Bangladesh and Cuba found the two places the
same, telling me with welled-up eyes that "You don't
understand. In the third world what really matters is
getting food. It doesn't matter what kind of restrictions
they live under."
Cuba remains like the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union. My memoir
has been banned there, and I've been declared an enemy of
the revolution. Government permission is required to travel
abroad, change jobs or residence, own a computer, access the
Internet, sell products or services, gain access to a boat,
retain a lawyer, organize activities or performances, or
form a business. One cannot receive religious instruction,
watch independent TV stations, read anything not approved or
published by the government, earn more than the government-
controlled rate ($17 per month for most jobs, $34 per month
for professionals), refuse to participate in mass rallies
organized by the Party, or criticize the laws, the regime,
or the Party.
Sugar is no longer the chief source of income; last year,
the regime closed down half the sugar mills. Much of the
countryside now is fallow. An invasive plant has taken over
much of these formerly rich producing sugar fields. Tourism,
mostly European and Canadian, is now the main source of
income. Since the 1950s, the only construction that has
taken place in Cuba is that which the Soviets did, which is
very little. The population is nearly double what it was in
1959, but there is no new housing. There are cases where a
couple divorces, each remarries, and all four live together.
European firms, mostly Spanish, Italian, and French, invest
in hotels in Cuba because they make good money. They put up
all the capital, Cuba provides only the land, which it
leases. The laborers are paid European union wages. But the
workers don't receive this; the government skims it.
It requires special government approval to work in one of
these highly coveted hotel jobs. The only Cubans allowed to
set foot in these hotels and restaurants or use their
beaches are those who work there. So the best beaches,
hotels, and stores are off-limits to Cubans. If I weren't an
enemy of the people and was allowed to visit, my 81-year-old
uncle wouldn't be allowed to meet me in the hotel or join me
for a swim. Last year, a thick book of laws came out
regulating contacts between Cubans and foreigners. It is now
illegal for any Cuban to accept a tip or gift from a
foreigner.
My uncle has revealed to me two very sad things about Cuba
today. First, the verb "to steal," robar, no longer exists
in Cuba. No one steals; they just solve their problems. And
if there is no private property, can you have any theft?
Second, there is no trust. Everyone knows that everyone else
is looking to get something from them.
And so it is very difficult for me to read things like the
following, from an August 2003 article in The Guardian by
then Labour MP Brian Wilson entitled "Revolution revisited:
Cuba isn't perfect, but it is living proof that it is
possible for a third world country to combat poverty,
disease, and illiteracy": "Cuba's primary service to the
world has been to provide living proof that it is possible
to conquer poverty, disease and illiteracy in a country that
was grossly over-familiar with all three. . . . The fact
that it has been delivered in the face of sustained
hostility from an obsessive neighbor [the U.S.] makes it all
the more stunning." Here's a response to a 2004 PBS
documentary on Fidel Castro from a man in Texas, posted at
the PBS website: "Everyone below the age of 50 don't know
about the conditions of Cuba before Fidel. When a revolution
is successful there is a reason and the reason in Cuba was
poverty. . . . Without the strength of Castro, Cuba will
fall into decline searching for a direction and will come
under the fold of the United States just as it was in the
40s and 50s."
What's behind this? Bigotry of the worst sort. It is pure
ignorance based on the assumption that unless they have a
strong leader like Fidel Castro, Cubans can't take care of
themselves. I call it the Mussolini principle. In the 1930s
many Americans and British praised Mussolini because he made
the trains run on time, he made those unruly Italians
mindful of time and efficient.
Travel writers do Cuba great disservice. As an exception,
Thomas Swick of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel wrote a
beautiful piece, recording the inane comments his fellow
travel writers made on their trip ("Our Gang in Havana,"
Mar. 24, 2002). The comments sound like they are discussing
Rousseau's noble savage or Kipling's White Man's Burden.
Sarah Shuckburg, a travel writer for the UK's Telegraph, writes as
follows:
"I sit on a bench in a tiny park, and the colour, music
and exuberance of old Havana engulf me. . . . An
intoxicating blend of Spanish guitars and African
drumbeats drifts from a nearby bar, where an elderly
couple is performing an afternoon salsa. . . . Three
barefoot boys in tattered shorts kick a dented can over
the cobbles. Bare-chested men exchange jokes as they
push barrows of rubble. A grizzled, toothless man
approaches me and holds out his hand. I give him a few
tiny coins." ("A little local colour," Mar. 5, 2006)
She thinks of this as praise for the revolution. But where
are the sports programs? And the old man is grizzled and
toothless because Cubans don't have any razors or
toothpaste. They have awful dental and medical care. Even
Castro had to call for a Spanish surgeon to come and save
his life.
I'll conclude by letting you think about how Shuckburg
summarized her experience in Cuba, based on what we've
discussed:
"Cubans are lucky, with several giants to worship -
principled, visionary reformers. Fidel Castro is one of
them. There are few photographs of him, and no statues,
but for most Cubans, Castro is a living legend who has
maintained his communist ideals despite the collapse of
communism elsewhere, and despite sanctions and embargoes
from the 'enemy' to the north. The Cubans I speak to all
share Castro's patriotism and his distrust of democracy,
and are intensely proud of Cuba's egalitarianism,
education, health care and sporting achievements. None
of them mention human rights or freedom of expression."
__________________________________________
Notes
[1] Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a
Violent World (2006)
_____________________________________________
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Carlos Eire is the Riggs Professor of History and
Religious
Studies at Yale University and author of Waiting for Snow in
Havana (2003), the One Book/One Philadelphia selection for
2007. This essay is based on his presentation at Living
Without Freedom, a History Institute for Teachers sponsored
by FPRI's Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education,
May 5-6, 2007, held at and co-sponsored by the National
Constitution Center and the National Liberty Museum in
Philadelphia. FPRI's History Institute program is chaired by
David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall and receives core
support from the Annenberg Foundation. The program on Living
without Freedom was supported by a grant from the Lynde and
Harry Bradley Foundation. See www.fpri.org for videocasts
and texts of this and other lectures.