Cuba, Eastern Europe, and the intellectuals

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I characteristically submitted my last submission with the BCC list in
the subject line. Kind of undermines the whole purpose of blind
copies.  So here is a corrected version, with the BCC where it
belongs.


I think that Walter's quotes from Fidel about the intellectuals that
and the item from Granma on Orwell that I submitted make a good set.
It shows how alien the Cubans are from the bureaucrats' way of doing
business.  Fidel is incapable of even conceiving of functioning the
way the  Soviet-bloc regimes did in Eastern Europe.

I have no guilt pangs about having defended Kuron and the like in
earlier decades.

I saw their defense (and even the defense of Sakharov and
Sbolzhenitsyn) as a fight for rights and to open the possibility of
an honest confrontation with the facts (including the Gulag, and
despite Solzhenitsyn's mixes of fact and fantasy in his books). This
was a way to open up political space for the working begin preparing
itself class to take hold of the situation. The repression of those
people contributed to the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union.

Many of the people I have defended over the years have ended up, like
Kuron, cheerily feeding on the manure pile of  imperialist domination.
Well, that's show business.

Cuba doesn't have a stratum of dedicated oppositional intellectuals,
of well-earmed international reputation, who put their lives on the
line for their beliefs -- as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn were, in fact.
The reason for this is not because they toss them in jail right quick,
but because Cuban society does not mass produce them as did Soviet and
East European socities under Stalin and his successors.

Kuron and Modzelewski (I have no idea where Modzelewski is, but I
assume he is not in the hills outside Gdansk, fighting for socialism)
are responsible for their actions and views at every point, but they
are not responsible for the collapse of  "socialism" in Eastern
Europe.  That job was done by the bureaucratic regimes from Moscow to
Berlin.

The  Stalinist regimes collapsed and were replaced by something even
more rotten and degenerate because they was pretty rotten and
degenerate itself.  It ended in collapse and ruin because those
methods of rule in every area were headed for collapse and ruin.

So my response to the  charges that Kuron and Modzelewski  are
responsible in part for this has to be: "case dismissed."  Or at
least, hardly worth considering unless the thousands who were
responsible for the policies and actions of the Polish and Soviet
governments after World War II have been thrown in the pokey -- which
I don't advocate.

Fidel once referred to the society that Cuba could become if it
followed the Soviet methods as "a system worse than capitalism." Its
fall was inevitable, and its replacement by something even worse
became inevitable when the working class, in addition to seeing not
much worth defending in what they had (and I don't feel competent to
challenge their judgment), proved unable at the time to take advantage
of the collapse to forge something better.

We can discuss why this came to be.  It seems to me8 that the regimes
themselves (not types like Kuron, Modzelewski, Walesa, Sakharov,
Solzhenitsyn, and the like) bear overwhelming  responsibility for so
deeply undermining the class consciousness and class confidence of the
working class.

What we have today, it seems to me,  is the society even worse than
the society worse than capitalism, a proper reflection of the rapidly
deepening decay of world capitalism today.

Frankly I propose looking to the future.  I have this feeling that if
we keep turning back to wipe away nostalgic tears over the lost
glories of the Soviet bloc, we will all be turned into pillars of
salt, at least as far as effective political activity is concerned.
Fred Feldman