[Marxism] Farber, Cuba, and Proletarian Dan

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dan Russell says he veers between the PSL, which supports
Cuba completely and without criticism, and Sam Farber and
the ISO, who oppose Cuba totally and completely. I have
not time to today to write more, but here are some items
as a start to a response to him, especially about the
indictment Farber makes against Cuban foreign policy.
I will try to get some more materials together. The new
item at first here, from TEMAS, is a detailed look at
the relationships between Cuba and Africa, and Africa's
impact on Cuba over the first fifty years of the Cuban
Revolution.  Sorry, must go quickly today.


Walter Lippmann
Havana, Cuba
=======================================================

TEMAS no. 56: 29-37, octubre-diciembre de 2008.

Fifty Years of African Impact on Cuba:
By David GonzÃlez LÃpez

AmÃlcar Cabral Chair. University of Havana.

http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs2297.html 
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

=======================================================

Fidel Castro, being so commanding a presence, his absence from the public
scene here in Cuba is causing endless confusion and anxiety among certain
circles...in Miami. There are those who've been predicting the end of the
Cuban Revolution - they usually refer to it as "the Castro regime" for so
long they must be getting exhausted by now. Andres Oppenheimer, to cite a
prominent example, is often given an ironic "promptness award" for his
seventeen-year-old compendium of supposed Cuban end-of-the-regime
rottenness, entitled, "Castro's Final Hour".

Here in Cuba, Fidel's absence is something to which Cubans are pretty much
"acostumbrado". It's been going on for so long now, in its third year, that
Cubans are simply used to it. Of course, people speak about his influence,
or note his absence in one way or another. But his daily presence, which to
some was like music while to some it was a troubling racket, is simply no
longer a part of daily life in this country. He hasn't made an appearance
in public since July 26, 2006. (I attended his Bayamo speech that day.)

Daniel Chavarria's darkly comic novels ADIOS MUCHACHOS and TANGO FOR A
TORTURER provide their readers with a sardonic look at contemporary Cuba
during these oddly-changing times, in a murder-mystery format. They're out
in English for those interested. Chavarria has lived here in Cuba for many
years and sometimes writes for the daily Cuban media, as here. Nothing
fictional in this essay, which answers the question quite eloquently.


Walter Lippmann
Havana, Cuba
=========================================================================

GRANMA
January 9, 2009

THE GOVERNMENT OF JOSÃ MARTÃ
Daniel ChavarrÃa*

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs2290.html

Throughout the past 15 years, several âmainly Europeanâ journalists
coincided in asking me what was going to happen when Fidel would no longer
be in command of the state. And I, who could never find the way to summarize
all that I would have been able to say on that subject, used to slip away
with the emphatic statement that, irrespective of who would govern,
everything would stay the same, according to the guidelines traced by Fidel.


But since the recent Rio Group summit at San Salvador de Bahia, I have found
an answer which seems more sensible to me. I was inspired by Fidel, when he
affirmed, while confronting his interrogators, that Josà Martà had been the
intellectual author of the attack on the Moncada Barracks.

A few days ago, in the course of a telephone interview for Uruguay Radio of
Montevideo, the journalist asked me whether it was Fidel or Raul who
governed in Cuba today, and it occurred to me to say that in Cuba, for the
past 50 years, it was Josà Martà who governed. Of course, to avoid the risk
of making people think that this was no more than a rhetorical phrase, I had
to go back into Cuban history and to explain that, when Cuban nationality
was still incipiently being forged, Spanish colonialism imposed shackles and
chains on a barely 16-year-old Josà MartÃ, and subjected him to forced labor
at a quarry in Havana, before deporting him to Spain. I further explained
that, ever since, the young patriot lived a life full of deprivation and
exiles, totally consecrated to the achievement of freedom for his beloved
island, and that, upon his return, when he was 42 years old, carrying his
vast humanistic culture, political insight and poetry upon his shoulders, he
gave his life in the course of a cavalry charge, being a short man devoid of
physical energy and military experience as he was.

The seed of courage and loyalty to the last consequence planted by him was
later reborn in Mella, Guiteras, Fidel, RaÃl, the heroic women of the Sierra
Maestra, Frank PaÃs, Camilo Cienfuegos, Almeida and our Five Heroes who are
in prison, where they were sent by the empire; and today, 50 years after the
bases were built and the road was traced by Fidelâs political genius, any
one of his faithful comrades can govern Cuba, because what is truly at the
helm is the already ancestral ethics that Martà forever planted. And there
is no rhetoric nor hyperbole in proclaiming that, since 1959, what is
governing Cuba is MartÃâs ideals of patriotism, justice, solidarity that
were inherited by Fidel and his followers, RaÃl among them.

Anyone, Fidel himself included, might make mistakes, or his advisors might
make them; but not even the enemies of the Revolution question Raulâs nor
Fidelâs nor any of his comradeâs honesty, bravery and patriotism. And in
these times, when the ideas of Marx and Lenin again come to life; and Hugo
ChÃvez, inspired competitor and interpreter of the Liberator, SimÃn BolÃvar,
again proclaims the visionary Latin-Americanism of his teacher; and with Evo
and Correa, and with a clearer horizon in Southernmost South America, in
Central America and the Caribbean in this year 2008, there are more than
enough stimuli to welcome with hopes and happiness the anniversary of the
Cuban Revolutionâs half century.

Above all, we should celebrate the fact that, in spite of its geographical
smallness, its relative poverty and the brutal blockade that oppresses it,
Cuba has never submitted nor stopped giving examples of a selfless
solidarity that is unprecedented in the history of nations. A solidarity
that the brother nations of this continent acknowledge and thank nowadays;
and that is why the Group of Rio welcomed, with a unanimous enthusiasm, the
revolutionary islandâs incorporation to its bosom. Of course, imperialism,
the sell-outs who always exist and the media that honor the US dollar
continue their mercenary intrigues and their attacks against Cuba. The
nerve!

I explained to my Uruguayan compatriots the heroic and triumphal epic of the
Cuban military in Africa, that imperialism and its hirelings have tried to
ignore. But its numerous beneficiaries throughout the world increasingly
recall it, and nowadays vote at the UN, at a crushing ratio of 185 to 3, in
favour of Cuba and against the US.

And I have explained, for the benefit of Uruguayans, that 300 000 volunteers
took off from here to assist Angolaâs independence, that was threatened by
apartheid South Africans and the bands of Savimbi and of other vernacular
lackeys of the gringos. And Cubans also contributed to Namibiaâs
independence and, according to what Nelson Mandela has stated, without
Cubaâs help it would not have been possible to defeat and to forever uproot
apartheid from southernmost Southern Africa. But Cuba did not profit from
its stay in Africa to create firms nor commercial agencies, nor did it bring
back even one diamond nor a gallon of oil. It only brought back, as RaÃl has
said, the remains of over 2 000 compatriots. Many of them offered their
lives for their brothers, grandsons or great-grandsons of their very African
great-great-grandfathers.

I told them that Cuba is the only country that has been giving
free-of-charge healthcare to the children who were contaminated as a result
of the accident at the Ukranian thermonuclear plant of Chernobil in the
1980s. As regards democratic Europe and the USA, after promising the moon
and the stars and offering a ridiculous initial charity, they never
delivered anything. And I informed that Cuba is also responsible for the 35
000 doctors that it disseminated throughout the world, in the Guatemalan
jungles, on the slopes of the Himalaya, in African villages or the islands
of the South Pacific. Those are medical doctors that put their lives at risk
and cure without billing, by a simple impulse of solidarity with the human
species that Josà Martà taught them to feel. And I remembered them the
heroic deed of Operation Miracle (OperaciÃn Milagro) that is intended to
allow millions of poor people to recover their eyesight, and the teachers
that triumphed over illiteracy among the wretched of the earth with the
method I can (Yo sà puedo).

It would be endless to enumerate what Cuba has achieved with its scant
resources in educating at no cost whatsoever its brothers in Latin America
and the Third World, and in training doctors, engineers, athletes, art
instructors.

We must acknowledge that the blockade and âto a certain extentâ nature has
prevented great economic achievements from being attained during these past
50 years, but to generate such a large number of internationalists of
solidarity is perhaps more important than immediate material results. For if
one man alone was able to plant the seed of so many goods, and another one
like Fidel was able to multiply them, you can imagine what the future
generations will receive from this growing legion of solidarity heroes
offering health, education and instances of the ethics of Martà nowadays
throughout the world.

* Uruguayan writer who lives in Cuba. After his first novel, Joy, considered
to be the best told detective story of the 1970s, he started a literary
career that would turn him into one of the major contemporary Latin American
novelists.


GRANMA
9 de enero 2009

http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/2009/01/09/interna/artic01.html

El Gobierno de Josà MartÃ

DANIEL CHAVARRÃA*


=========================================
     WALTER LIPPMANN
     Havana, Cuba
     Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
     "Cuba - Un ParaÃso bajo el bloqueo"
=========================================

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