[Marxism] Carlos Alberto Montaner: "Corporate Collaborators" (WSJ)

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The recent experience of Washington ordering a hotel in Mexico to
kick out their Cuban guests, keep the Cubans' money and send that
money to the United States government is certainly an indication
of the importance of the growing movement to expand economic ties
between Cuba and the United States. There are obviously important
sectors in U.S. life who are frightened of this deepening trend.

Check out the U.S. corporate executives who were attending the
Mexico City gathering finde Joe Newhart, manager of ExxonMobil 
Exploration Co., and Francisco Mendez, an attorney for tit,, as 
well as people from Valero Energy Corp, a subsidiary of Caterpiller 
Corpporation, which operates the largest independent refinery in 
the United States, and local government bodies from the Port of 
Corpus Christy, Texas and the Louisiand Economic Development 
Department. These are serious people who didn't fly down to have
a drink and smoke a couple of Cuban cigars for the weekend.

Today is Friday and more often than not, the Wall Street Journal
runs a column called "Americas" written by one Mary Anastasia
O'Grady, who bashes Cuba more often than any other subject. At
times the column is handed over to other guest columnists such
as today's, Carlos Alberto Montaner, the Cuban exile militant
living in Spain and who writes often for the MIAMI HERALD as a
strident but not unintelligent conservative commentator. Three
days ago, Montaner wrote in his regular MIAMI HERALD column 
that Latin America was irrelevant. Now he thinks it's so very
important that he should write this lengthy treatise whose aim
is obviously to organize resistance to the growing tide in U.S.
corporate circles toward a more normal relationship with Cuba.

At least, they WANT to do business with the island and not sit
back and watch China, India, Canada & and all the others make
money while U.S. government policy prevents U.S. corporations
from making money like the rest of them are doing...

Here's his "Region is irrelevant" column in the MIAMI HERALD:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/46920

He does have another history, however, as an individual who has
participated in terrorist activities in Cuba, according to two
very lengthy profiles which in Granma International last year:
http://www.walterlippmann.com/montaner.html
==================================================================

March 3, 2006
        
THE AMERICAS
        
Corporate Collaborators
By CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER
March 3, 2006; Page A11
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

A new economic model of a collectivist nature is emerging in parts of
Latin America with the complicity of some private-sector foreign
companies. It was first developed in the 1990s by Fidel Castro's
government as a consequence of the sudden cutoff of Soviet aid and
was later adopted by Venezuela after the rise to power of Hugo
Chávez. Very likely, Bolivia will move in the same direction. It is
what Chávez calls "21st-century socialism."

In 1991, when the Soviet subsidy to Cuba -- estimated at $5 billion a
year -- ended, the demise of communism on the island seemed
inevitable. Suddenly, the Cubans' already low levels of consumption
shrank by 30% to 50%, plunging the country into a real famine. Faced
with this situation -- which left thousands of Cubans disabled by
malnutrition -- Castro was forced to find capital and know-how in the
West to keep his foundering economy afloat. But he did so without
renouncing his dictatorship or the economic model based on state
monopolies tightly controlled by the government.

Quite simply, he invited foreign businessmen to become partners with
his government in "joint ventures" in which the foreign investors
contributed the capital and management while the Cuban state leased
to them a docile and cheap labor force, a sales territory and a
captive market that was not subject to the risks of competition or
the conflicts of labor unionism.

To ensure that the entrepreneurs would not be the Trojan horse of
feared democratic changes, the government appointed numerous retired
army officers and members of the political police as directors and
top executives of the joint ventures. To them, the government
assigned a dual mission: to make sure that corrupt foreign
businessmen did not contaminate the selfless Cuban workers, and to
watch the workers closely so they wouldn't deviate from the noble
principles of socialism.

By late 1998, when Hugo Chávez came to power, Castro already had
proven that he could avail himself of foreign capitalists to finance
-- without risk -- the largely unproductive Cuban dictatorship. So
the Venezuelan gradually began to re-examine and rewrite the
contracts with the foreign investors, especially in the sector of the
exploration and exploitation of oil fields, heeding the premise of
his Cuban comrade that association with international businessmen
would strengthen state-owned capitalism. Oil companies operating in
Venezuela that were affected by the rewriting of contracts included
British Petroleum, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, Total, Repsol YPF and
Statoil. Exxon preferred to sell its installations to Repsol and
withdraw from Venezuela. Whereas Lenin had stated that capitalists
would be willing to sell the rope with which they'd be hanged, Castro
had demonstrated that capitalists would gladly build the gallows
using the executioner's blueprint if they could somehow make a buck.

After the presidential election victory of Evo Morales, Bolivia may
be the third Latin American country to go this route. Vice President
Álvaro García Linares, a former university professor and one-time
guerrilla sent to prison for fighting against a democratic
government, said so recently in an article published in Paris by Le
Monde Diplomatique. Bolivia, he said, is going to develop
"Andean-Amazonian capitalism," in reality a new name for the old
discredited socialism. Of what does that new contrivance consist?
According to Don Álvaro, of "constructing a strong state that will
regulate the expansion of the industrial economy, extract its
surpluses and transfer them to the communitarian sector, so as to
foster forms of self-organization and mercantile development that are
properly Andean and Amazonian." To achieve that objective, which
basically means to exploit the major natural-gas deposits that exist
in Bolivia, Messrs. Morales and García Linera will have to become
partners with big foreign companies. Companies that are likely to be
most affected are Spain's Repsol YPF and Brazil's Petrobras.

To participate in these joint ventures in countries where human
rights and labor laws are not respected should constitute a serious
ethical problem for foreign businessmen and investors. It is absolute
hypocrisy to state that an international entrepreneur should not
invest in countries that use child labor or violate certain
ecological standards while allowing that entrepreneur to associate
with tyrannical governments that horribly mistreat the workers and,
in particular, the societies they subjugate.

For example, the foreign hotel chains operating in Cuba allow their
partner, the government, to practice a policy of apartheid by
forbidding Cubans to use hotel facilities, even if they can pay with
foreign currency. According to Delfin Fernandez, a defector from
Cuban counterintelligence writing and speaking in the Spanish media,
some foreign hotels even allow the installation in their rooms of
concealed video cameras to record guests in compromising situations
that lead to blackmail. To what degree are those businessmen
participating in criminal activities? Note that it is not the same to
invest or create an enterprise in a country ruled by dictatorship as
to join the dictators and become accomplices of their misdeeds.

Business schools in the Western world usually teach courses in
ethics. And that's good, because we assume that the system of market
economies and free enterprise, the counterpart of democracy, rests on
moral convictions whose tenets are the upholding of truth, the
observance of fair rules and respect for people's dignity. If we
expect politicians and professionals to behave in accordance with a
strict deontological code and demand that they be punished if they
deviate from the rules, why should we exclude businessmen from the
same obligations and standards?

International businessmen and investors should ponder hard the type
of responsibility they assume when offered a partnership in Latin
America with tyrannical governments or tyrannies in the making. It is
well to remember that some of the German companies that collaborated
with the Nazis in World War II ended up paying indemnities to the
regime's victims for several decades. Something like that might
happen again.

Mr. Montaner is an author and syndicated journalist living in Madrid.



________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism