# Reading > Poems, Poets, and Poetry >  To Fidel Castro by Pablo Neruda

## Red Terror

To Fidel Castro 

(by Pablo Neruda, *Song of Protest* Nobel Prize winner)


Fidel, Fidel, the people are grateful

for words in action and deeds that sing,

that is why I bring from far

a cup of my countrys wine:

it is the blood of a subterranean people

that from the shadows reaches your throat,

they are miners who have lived for centuries

extracting fire from the frozen land.

They go beneath the sea for coal

but on returning they are like ghosts:

they grew accustomed to eternal night,

the working-day light was robbed from them,

nevertheless here is the cup

of so much suffering and distances:

the happiness of imprisoned men

possessed by darkness and illusions

who from the inside of mines perceive

the arrival of spring and its fragrances

because they know that Man is struggling

to reach the amplest clarity.

And Cuba is seen by the Southern miners,

the lonely sons of la pampa,

the shepherds of cold in Patagonia,

the fathers of tin and silver,

the ones who marry cordilleras

extract the copper from Chuquicamata,

men hidden in buses

in populations of pure nostalgia,

women of the fields and workshops,

children who cried away their childhoods:

this is the cup, take it, Fidel.

It is full of so much hope 

that upon drinking you will know your victory

is like the aged wine of my country

made not by one man but by many men

and not by one grape but by many plants:

it is not one drop but many rivers:

not one captain but many battles.

And they support you because you represent

the collective honor of our long struggle,

and if Cuba were to fall we would all fall,

and we would come to lift her,

and if she blooms with flowers

she will flourish with our own nectar.

And if they dare touch Cubas

forehead, by your hands liberated,

they will find peoples fists,

we will take out our buried weapons:

blood and pride will come to rescue,

to defend our beloved Cuba.

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## Dreamwoven

The Cuban Revolution was so long ago that not many people remember the Batista Regime and the western media has not yet commented on the reasons for the revolution, including the Batista Dictatorship that was set up in 1952. The Bay of Pigs invasion by the US, nor the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. I remember that very well, as we spent two weeks in terror of World War III. Luckily, Khrushchev backed down and the ships delivering the missiles turned back.

I look forward to reading what _Dagens Nyheter_ reports about the real background to the Embargo that has been in force ever since the Revolution. And also about Cuba and how the country has managed in spite of the decades of embargo from Washington. How has Cuba managed to reform its education system, especially for women: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Cuba. We hear so little from Cuba despite our free media...

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## Danik 2016

I visited Cuba in the 80s, don´t remember the exact year anymore. Some things I remember:
Cuban hospitality.
Their love of music and dancing.
Cuban humour
The magic Malecon(strand street in Havana).
The historical and touristical part of Havana was impressive, but as soon as you left the main streets the houses looked degraded, because the citizens had no permission to refurbish or even to paint them.
Cuban´s creative cinema. How they made art with little means
Cubans on the street trying desperately to sell anything they could.
There was plenty of food for tourists, but for the citizen it was dealt out in rations. There was a kind of month ratio. One newspaper I kept for years stated that chicken was given out only to children up to a certain age. I don´t remember if that age was ten or fourteen years.
Tourists had free access to paid TV chanels, but the citizens not. To my astonishment one figure presented as a hero in the open chanel, was José Bonifácio, one of the chief minds of the Brazilian Republican Movement (second part of 19C).
The sudden black out in the evenings.
The few old cars in the streets of Havana. The prefered means of transport was the bycicle.

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## Pompey Bum

> I visited Cuba in the 80s, don´t remember the exact year anymore. Some things I remember:
> Cuban hospitality.
> Their love of music and dancing.
> Cuban humour
> The magic Malecon(strand street in Havana).
> The historical and touristical part of Havana was impressive, but as soon as you left the main streets the houses looked degraded, because the citizens had no permission to refurbish or even to paint them.
> Cuban´s creative cinema. How they made art with little means
> Cubans on the street trying desperately to sell anything they could.
> There was plenty of food for tourists, but for the citizen it was dealt out in rations. There was a kind of month ratio. One newspaper I kept for years stated that chicken was given out only to children up to a certain age. I don´t remember if that age was ten or fourteen years.
> ...


Hey, cool. And how about free speech?

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## YesNo

I closest I ever got to Cuba was Miami. I do enjoy the Cuban espressos.

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## Danik 2016

> Hey, cool. And how about free speech?


When I was there, many things were censored, starting with TV channels (I don´t know if there was any internet). For example I don´t remember if there was an official newspaper. And there was a control of the foreigners
that came into the country too. 
I don´t know how much things have changed since then.

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## Danik 2016

> I closest I ever got to Cuba was Miami. I do enjoy the Cuban espressos.


I never went to Miami myself. Are there many Cubans and Brazilians there, Yes/No?

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## Dreamwoven

I think that was the Batista supporters. One was interviewed who celebrating the death of Castro!

He was, of course, interviewed by Swedish TV...

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## Pompey Bum

@Danik: Oh yes, there are a great number of Cuban Americans in Miami. They are reacting very strongly to Castro's death. In fact, they are dancing in the streets. But then they are allowed to. ;-)

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## Danik 2016

Yes, I have seen them on TV.

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## Pompey Bum

> Yes, I have seen them on TV.


So what was the answer to my question about free speech? Or let me put it another way. President-Elect Trump greeted the news of Castro's death with the following: Fidel Castros legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights." In your opinion, what would happen to Cubans who said the same? What would happen if they danced in the streets?!

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## YesNo

> I never went to Miami myself. Are there many Cubans and Brazilians there, Yes/No?


I do remember going to a Brazilian restaurant in the mid or north Miami Beach area. I don't know what the demographics are. There are a large number Spanish-speaking people as well as a Jewish community in the mid area. I don't know how many would be speaking Portuguese. At the cafe area in the Publix Super Market I expect to have to either speak Spanish or point to what I want. Of course, what I want is usually some sort of pastry and a cortadito which doesn't require an extensive Spanish vocabulary.

This area looks like it is going to be one of the first places to flood from global warming. I figure we might as well enjoy it while it is still there.

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## Danik 2016

São Paulo is also being flooded by global warming. Every year the heat gets up one grade.
The cortadito is probably our "curto", the short coffee.

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## Pompey Bum

> I visited Cuba in the 80s, don´t remember the exact year anymore. Some things I remember:
> Cuban hospitality.
> Their love of music and dancing.
> Cuban humour
> The magic Malecon(strand street in Havana).
> The historical and touristical part of Havana was impressive, but as soon as you left the main streets the houses looked degraded, because the citizens had no permission to refurbish or even to paint them.
> Cuban´s creative cinema. How they made art with little means
> Cubans on the street trying desperately to sell anything they could.
> There was plenty of food for tourists, but for the citizen it was dealt out in rations. There was a kind of month ratio. One newspaper I kept for years stated that chicken was given out only to children up to a certain age. I don´t remember if that age was ten or fourteen years.
> ...


How about human rights violations? I've heard stories (just this morning) about dissidents being officially tortured and raped in Cuban prisons. In your opinion, are such stories true?

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## desiresjab

To whom was Castro's Cuba an improvement?

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## YesNo

> São Paulo is also being flooded by global warming. Every year the heat gets up one grade.
> The cortadito is probably our "curto", the short coffee.


I think there is some high land near São Paulo that the inhabitants on the coast could move to. In Florida, it is all pretty flat. What's worse, the ground is porous limestone and so one can't even put up a dike to hold back the water: it would just come up from the ground.

What do you think of Neruda? I know a lot of people like his work. Personally, the only thing that I find interesting is the "Veinte Poemas de Amor" (http://www.archivochile.com/Homenaje...neruda0007.pdf), but even in those poems I wonder what is actually going on.

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## Pompey Bum

Darn that page turn! Looking forward to your response, Danik.  :Smile: 




> So what was the answer to my question about free speech? Or let me put it another way. President-Elect Trump greeted the news of Castro's death with the following: Fidel Castros legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights." In your opinion, what would happen to Cubans who said the same? What would happen if they danced in the streets?!





> How about human rights violations? I've heard stories (just this morning) about dissidents being officially tortured and raped in Cuban prisons. In your opinion, are such stories true?

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## Clopin

Good, he's dead. Intellectuals always like to **** about and cozy up to tyrants with sex appeal so I'm not too surprised by the poem. 

You should see what our pitiful spineless leader had to say about the "passing of a great man" PB.

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## Pompey Bum

> You should see what our pitiful spineless leader had to say about the "passing of a great man" PB.


He needn't worry. Raul Castro has been in charge for a decade. Cuba retains every horror it enjoyed under the great man.

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## prendrelemick

> How about human rights violations? I've heard stories (just this morning) about dissidents being officially tortured and raped in Cuban prisons. In your opinion, are such stories true?



Was that in Guantanamo bay ?

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## Danik 2016

> I think there is some high land near São Paulo that the inhabitants on the coast could move to. In Florida, it is all pretty flat. What's worse, the ground is porous limestone and so one can't even put up a dike to hold back the water: it would just come up from the ground.
> 
> What do you think of Neruda? I know a lot of people like his work. Personally, the only thing that I find interesting is the "Veinte Poemas de Amor" (http://www.archivochile.com/Homenaje...neruda0007.pdf), but even in those poems I wonder what is actually going on.


The interior is usually still hotter than the capital. Rio is hotter than São Paulo but they have the sea brise there.To give you an idea last year we had what we called "winter 40 º" with temperatures soaring up to an uncommon level. This year winter and spring were more normal, they tell us it is on account of the stream "La ninã". Presently temperatures maxims are about 30º-32º .

I like Pablo Neruda, but not specifically his love poems. His poems are loaded with a typically hispanian imagery, very sensuous and at the first look often incongruous. I think English poetry is more sober, the methaphors are more easy to understand. But he has his humorous side too, which I prefer. I found a selection of poems translated to English. Have a look at his "Ode for The Tomato":

http://poetsofmodernity.xyz/POMBR/Sp...or_Toc12957994

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## Pompey Bum

> Was that in Guantanamo bay ?


Ad hominem tu quoque fallacy, Prend (not that Gitmo isn't an abomination).




> The interior is usually still hotter than the capital. Rio is hotter than São Paulo but they have the sea brise there.To give you an idea last year we had what we called "winter 40 º" with temperatures soaring up to an uncommon level. This year winter and spring were more normal, they tell us it is on account of the stream "La ninã". Presently temperatures maxims are about 30º-32º .
> 
> I like Pablo Neruda, but not specifically his love poems. His poems are loaded with a typically hispanian imagery, very sensuous and at the first look often incongruous. I think English poetry is more sober, the methaphors are more easy to understand. But he has his humorous side too, which I prefer. I found a selection of poems translated to English. Have a look at his "Ode for The Tomato":
> 
> http://poetsofmodernity.xyz/POMBR/Sp...or_Toc12957994


Another question, Danik: in your opinion is turning one's head from the reality of human evil one of the things that enables it?

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## YesNo

> The interior is usually still hotter than the capital. Rio is hotter than São Paulo but they have the sea brise there.To give you an idea last year we had what we called "winter 40 º" with temperatures soaring up to an uncommon level. This year winter and spring were more normal, they tell us it is on account of the stream "La ninã". Presently temperatures maxims are about 30º-32º .
> 
> I like Pablo Neruda, but not specifically his love poems. His poems are loaded with a typically hispanian imagery, very sensuous and at the first look often incongruous. I think English poetry is more sober, the methaphors are more easy to understand. But he has his humorous side too, which I prefer. I found a selection of poems translated to English. Have a look at his "Ode for The Tomato":
> 
> http://poetsofmodernity.xyz/POMBR/Sp...or_Toc12957994


It seems to be unusually warm in Chicago for this time of year. Although we are at higher sea level, flooding could occur with a large quantity of rainfall that can't be drained fast enough.

Neruda's tomato poem was nice. These two lines stand out for me: "Sadly we have to/murder it" That is not what I think I'm doing when I slice a tomato to make a salad.

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## Pompey Bum

Now where could Danik have gone?

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## Danik 2016

> It seems to be unusually warm in Chicago for this time of year. Although we are at higher sea level, flooding could occur with a large quantity of rainfall that can't be drained fast enough.
> 
> Neruda's tomato poem was nice. These two lines stand out for me: "Sadly we have to/murder it" That is not what I think I'm doing when I slice a tomato to make a salad.


I hope you don´t get any floods, here they are disastrous, but they usually occur in summer.
The tomatoes we slice are already dead, I think. But certain poems change our manner of looking at things.

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## Pompey Bum

Oh, there you are! Hey, I thought of another one: if Donald Trump had put his political enemies in front of firing squads, would you be still talking about the weather? ;-)

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## prendrelemick

I'd probably be dead.

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## prendrelemick

Both Neruda and me hoped it would turn out better than it did.

Castro was a very bad man. Perhaps those 700+ CIA plots against his life made him a little edgy in the mornings. 

Asinus asellum culpat .

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## Pompey Bum

> Perhaps those 700+ CIA plots against his life made him a little edgy in the mornings.


I'm sure they did. Lyndon Johnson went to his grave believing that Castro had killed Kennedy because Kennedy kept trying to kill him. But that's got nothing to do with the people Castro tortured and murdered. 




> Asinus asellum culpat.


I disagree. Castro enjoyed enough useful idiots in his lifetime. As I said to Danik on another thread, silence breeds pestilence. He was a very bad man, as you say. Good men and women need to keep saying it.

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## prendrelemick

Yet Kennedy like Neruda supported the revolution at first. That's politics !

"I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear."
— U.S. President John F. Kennedy

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## Clopin

And he was right to support it at the time.

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## JCamilo

I do not care about Trump (or Guatanamo and many atrocites that Democratic countries have made because sometimes the freedom that is destroyed is not near home). Castro did horrible things. Castro also did amazing things. I will not care about killing people as I will not advocate my country to follow this pattern, but I care about a country that basic health treatment, without money, is a world reference. Or how their education level if higher than Brazil for example. Those are things we must praise just like we praise the cultural elizabetean period despite she killing her enemies over and over.

P.S.I do not care about Neruda poem either. He wrote better stuff.

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## Pompey Bum

> Those are things we must praise just like we praise the cultural elizabetean period despite she killing her enemies over and over.


If Castro had lived in the 16th century I might think more of him.  :Smile:

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## JCamilo

I think we should not like politicians. If Artists are able to disapoint us as much, imagine them.

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## Pompey Bum

> I think we should not like politicians. If Artists are able to disapoint us as much, imagine them.


Well, we could always have Nero: bad emperor and bad lyrist.  :Smile:

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## YesNo

> P.S.I do not care about Neruda poem either. He wrote better stuff.


Which Neruda poems do you like?

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## JCamilo

The poems in Canto General that deal with politics (but more towards Soviet Union) and are a bit of Song of Myself for Latin American are better. His Cien Sonnets of Amor also have better stuff, and Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada wtih a poem that is a favorite (and probally among those who made Borges call Neruda a second rate romantic poem: Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche

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## Red Terror

You people are so ignorant that it makes me seethe with indignation ...

In the American lexicon, in addition to good and bad bases and missiles, there are good and bad revolutions. The American and French Revolutions were good. The Cuban Revolution is bad. It must be bad because so many people have left Cuba as a result of it.

But at least 100,000 people left the British colonies in America during and after the American Revolution [out of a population of 3 or 4 million inhabitants]. These Tories could not abide by the political and social changes, both actual and feared, particularly that change which attends all revolutions worthy of the name: Those looked down upon as inferiors no longer know their place. (Or as the US Secretary of State put it after the Russian Revolution: The Bolsheviks sought to make the ignorant and incapable mass of humanity dominant in the earth.) 

The Tories fled to Nova Scotia and Britain carrying tales of the godless, dissolute, barbaric American revolutionaries. Those who remained and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the new state governments were denied virtually all civil liberties. Many were jailed, murdered, or forced into exile. After the American Civil War, thousands more fled to South America and other points, again disturbed by the social upheaval. How much more is such an exodus to be expected following the Cuban Revolution  a true social revolution, giving rise to changes much more profound than anything in the American experience? How many more would have left the United States if 90 miles away lay the worlds wealthiest nation welcoming their residence and promising all manner of benefits and rewards? ---- *Killing Hope* by William Blum

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## Red Terror

Cuba did all these things while at the same time fighting Uncle Sam in the Bay of Pigs and Operation: Mongoose. How many factories were destroyed by the CIA during the 1960s and the 1970s??? Economic sabotage by the 
Helms-Burton law and the embargo implemented by a superpower against its former island-colony. Also, CIA-mafia attempted assassination attempts against Castro. History will never reveal how Cuba and the Castro government (and the USSR government) may have developed if they were not under siege by Uncle Sam.

"The boys of capital, they ... chortle in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century-- without exception-- has either been crushed, overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted, subverted, or destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one socialist government or movement-- from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in El Salvador-- not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home. 

It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded their collective heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Man shall never fly." *Killing Hope* by William Blum

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Einstein.htm







> I do not care about Trump (or Guatanamo and many atrocites that Democratic countries have made because sometimes the freedom that is destroyed is not near home). Castro did horrible things. Castro also did amazing things. I will not care about killing people as I will not advocate my country to follow this pattern, but I care about a country that basic health treatment, without money, is a world reference. Or how their education level if higher than Brazil for example. Those are things we must praise just like we praise the cultural elizabetean period despite she killing her enemies over and over.
> 
> P.S.I do not care about Neruda poem either. He wrote better stuff.

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## Pompey Bum

> You people are so ignorant that it makes me seethe with indignation ...


Okay man, we'll work on it.  :Smile:

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## YesNo

> The poems in Canto General that deal with politics (but more towards Soviet Union) and are a bit of Song of Myself for Latin American are better. His Cien Sonnets of Amor also have better stuff, and Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada wtih a poem that is a favorite (and probally among those who made Borges call Neruda a second rate romantic poem: Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche


I haven't read "100 sonetos de amor", but I will try to work my way through it with the help of Google translate and YouTube: http://www.archivochile.cl/Homenajes...neruda0018.pdf

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## Pompey Bum

Danik: I want to apologize to you. I was grilling you about human rights because I thought you 
we're ignoring my original question about free speech. But having read the thread over again, I see that you did answer it as soon as I asked--I just missed the post. Here is what you wrote:




> When I was there, many things were censored, starting with TV channels (I don´t know if there was any internet). For example I don´t remember if there was an official newspaper. And there was a control of the foreigners
> that came into the country too. 
> I don´t know how much things have changed since then.


This was all my fault and none of yours. I am sorry and embarrassed. My sincere apologies.

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## Danik 2016

PB,
Thanks for your apologies, they are accepted.

If I ceased to answer you it was exactly because of the "grilling" and because you tried to give the conversation a turn I didn´t intend.

As a Brazilian I have had the experience of dictatorship and censorship. I try to be careful not only what I write on an open forum but how I write about it. If I am not too open that is absolutely deliberate.

And a learned, intelligent man with a strong sensibility like you is definitively above "grilling" other people! :Thumbsup:

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## Dreamwoven

> PB,
> Thanks for your apologies, they are accepted.
> 
> If I ceased to answer you it was exactly because of the "grilling" and because you tried to give the conversation a turn I didn´t intend.
> 
> As a Brazilian I have had the experience of dictatorship and censorship. I try to be careful not only what I write on an open forum but how I write about it. If I am not too open that is absolutely deliberate.
> 
> And a learned, intelligent man with a strong sensibility like you is definitively above "grilling" other people!


Well, free speech is always limited one way or another, if only out of politeness and consideration for others...

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## Pompey Bum

> Well, free speech is always limited one way or another, if only out of politeness and consideration for others...


And in a free society, DW, that kind of restriction is self-determined and not imposed by the state. Are we in agreement on that?

EDIT: And he's gone! Hope he was not restricted from speaking his opinion.  :Smile:

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## prendrelemick

Red Terror makes exactly the point I was trying to write about (thankfully now abandoned), Cuba was put under unimaginable pressure for decades. What would've happened without that pressure? Or without Castro? We'll never know, but a glance across the Windward Passage at Haiti is a clue I think. ( That could be Castro's epitaph "Yeah, but look at Haiti".)
Each society has it's own version of history, The Cuban experience embarrassed America, and led to a deep and extrordinary enmity that lasted 60 years. 
So where is the truth? Castro did bad things, America did bad things, Russia didn't help. As EP. Thompson said, you have to wait at least a hundred years before attempting to write the history of anything.

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## Pompey Bum

And as I said at the time: 




> that's got nothing to do with the people Castro tortured and murdered.


Because (as I also mentioned) the idea that what Castro did is okay because of what America did, or as you say...




> Castro did bad things, America did bad things


...is a logical fallacy. Do we really need to do this again?

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## Danik 2016

> Well, free speech is always limited one way or another, if only out of politeness and consideration for others...


To be sure, DW. For example, do we know if Cubans are reading this thread?

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## Pompey Bum

Now it's DW who won't answer my question!  :Smile:  

How about you, Danik? Do you agree that in a free society speech restrictions based on politeness and respect for others need to be self-imposed rather than mandated by the state? As an ancillary question: would my apology to you have carried any meaning if I had not chosen to give it but was acting under constraint?

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## Danik 2016

Of course, PB. Please read my post right above you.  :Smile:

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## Pompey Bum

That doesn't specify whether the limitation on speech is to be voluntary or mandatory, and that makes all the difference. The voluntary limitation of speech is a freedom (the right to remain silent). But mandatory abridgment of speech that the state deems offensive is a tyranny. But from what you say we agree on this. 

I was originally responding to this comment by DW: 




> Well, free speech is always limited one way or another, if only out of politeness and consideration for others...


My question to him (still unanswered) was:




> And in a free society, DW, that kind of restriction is self-determined and not imposed by the state. Are we in agreement on that?


You there DW?

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## JCamilo

> And in a free society, DW, that kind of restriction is self-determined and not imposed by the state. Are we in agreement on that?
> 
> EDIT: And he's gone! Hope he was not restricted from speaking his opinion.


That is too easy, Pompey. In a free society you do not need to impose anything. You cannot impose anything. 

Now, the true question is if in a specific society. One that is not free.

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## Danik 2016

:Iagree:  :Wave:

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## Pompey Bum

> That is too easy, Pompey. In a free society you do not need to impose anything. You cannot impose anything.


Of course there is and of course you must. Law must be imposed for the safety of the public. We manage that with relatively few executions, but when never without a trial. Believe me, there is nothing easy about being free.

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## prendrelemick

> And as I said at the time: 
> 
> 
> 
> Because (as I also mentioned) the idea that what Castro did is okay because of what America did, or as you say...
> 
> 
> 
> ...is a logical fallacy. Do we really need to do this again?



Killing and torture is never ok.

You seem to be saying if anyone points out some good Castro's adminstration did, they are condoning or ignoring torture. (Isn't that a Logical Fallacy too?) They are not. Your country and mine was recently involved in Extraordinary Rendition, (a fancy phrase for kidnap and torture,) does that mean we can't point out our great freedoms and achievements ?

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## Pompey Bum

> 


I'm confused, Danik. You said above that you agreed with me. So what is your answer to these questions? (Your OWN answer, please). 




> How about you, Danik? Do you agree that in a free society speech restrictions based on politeness and respect for others need to be self-imposed rather than mandated by the state? As an ancillary question: would my apology to you have carried any meaning if I had not chosen to give it but was acting under constraint?

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## Pompey Bum

> Killing and torture is never ok.


Can you show me where I have ever said that it is? Please be sure to include the specific killing and torture I was referring to. 




> You seem to be saying if anyone points out some good Castro's adminstration did, they are condoning torture?


Of course I didn't. The fallacy lies in trying to justify one wrong by pointing out someone else's wrong. That just gives you two wrongs.




> Your country and mine was recently involved in Extraordinary Rendition, (a fancy phrase for kidnap and torture,) does that mean we can't point out our great freedoms and achievements ?


Correct. It was an atrocity. It does not, however, justify other atrocities. As you say, it is always wrong. In the same way, the Castro's torture and murder of political dissidents cannot be justified by pointing out the atrocities at Gitmo (which you try to do above) or with blanket statements that, hey, Cuba did some bad, but then America did some bad, too. Nor does any benefit Castro may have brought to women or the arts justify his crimes. You, of course, are free to discuss those benefits. Where exactly have I denied them?

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## prendrelemick

There is also freedom not to speak I hope.

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## JCamilo

Well, that is because you do not disagree with me. 




> Of course there is and of course you must. Law must be imposed for the safety of the public. We manage that with relatively few executions, but when never without a trial. Believe me, there is nothing easy about being free.


Yes, Laws must be imposed (if you imagine the public body to be something apart from the private body in a society, which I dont). But who said this was a free society, the one you mention in your original question? If you are imposing laws, you just didnt got there yet.

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## Pompey Bum

> There is also freedom not to speak I hope.


If you are referring to Danik, he did speak, twice, and in to opposite effect. It's reasonable enough to ask for a clarification. If he doesn't want to talk he can just say so. But in that case why hide behind the sign? 

But if you are speaking about something else, my country has a right to remain silent, and it is my understanding that yours has an only slightly limited equivalent (I'm not sure how limited). So yes, for us there is a right not to speak. Dissidents in Cuban prisons (to this day) lack that right. They are expected to talk.

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## prendrelemick

> Can you show me where I have ever said that? Please be sure to include the specific killing and torture I was referring to.


I can't, neither of us have ever said torture was ok. I was responding to your pp by agreeing with you.





> Of course I didn't. The fallacy is in justifying one wrong by pointing out someone else's wrong. That just gives you two wrongs.


I thought it was an error in reasoning that renders an arguement invalid. 





> Correct. It was an atrocity. It does not, however, justify other atrocities. As you say, it is always wrong. In the same way, the Castro's torture and murder of political dissidents cannot be justified by pointing out the atrocities at Gitmo (which you try to do above) or with blanket statements that, hey, Cuba did some bad, but then America did some bad, too. Nor does any benefit Castro may have brought to women or the arts justify his crimes. You, of course, are free to discuss those benefits. Where exactly have I denied them?



Ok then, He was a torturer who did some good things for his country.

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## Pompey Bum

> But who said this was a free society, the one you mention in your original question? If you are imposing laws, you just didnt got there yet.


I disagree. A free society requires justice, not anarchy. But you are right that no society is perfectly free. That only makes freedoms (like the freedom of speech) more precious and worthy to defend. 

I feel like Sinbad, fighting three at a time.  :Smile:

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## prendrelemick

I can't type fast enough to keep up :Smilewinkgrin:  Loving this all the same.

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## Pompey Bum

> I thought it was an error in reasoning that renders an arguement invalid.


It is. Two wrongs don't make a right is an actual logical fallacy. 




> Ok then, He was a torturer who did some good things for his country.


And as you and I agree, any good he did does not justify his tortures and murders, because (as you have said), they are always wrong.

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## Pompey Bum

> I can't type fast enough to keep up Loving this all the same.


Yeah, I didn't sleep last night, but I reckon my logic is still good enough. Where did Danik go?

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## prendrelemick

Ok I think what I've been driving at is that Christian adage, let him without sin cast the first stone. (not Pompey but western Governments and commentators I hasten to say.) America has been stone chucker in chief for a very long time, so I do think it is justifiable to point out its own similar wrongdoings when discussing Cuba. Also pertinent is - Do not judge lest ye be judged, who guards the guards and pot,kettle, black.

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## prendrelemick

> It is. Two wrongs don't make a right is an actual logical fallacy. 
> 
> 
> 
> And as you and I agree, any good he did does not justify his tortures and murders, because (as you have said), they are always wrong.


Justification is another argument - I suspect I may have to agree with you there. :Cryin: 

How many rights and wrongs make a right? is it 3:1?

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## JCamilo

> I disagree. A free society requires justice, not anarchy. But you are right that no society is perfectly free. That only makes freedoms (like the freedom of speech) more precious and worthy to defend. 
> 
> I feel like Sinbad, fighting three at a time.


But imposed laws or not are not something that will lead or grant anarchy. If you, me, Jack, Gilliam and Hank each impose a law, we are creating chaos, no? Of course, if you mean political anarchy, it is something more libertarian than chaotic. But yeah, the point is that there is no society perfectly free (it is the objective and in your question it was already stabilished) and the form - either by individual efforts or by public efforts or both - it will be achived depends on the state of the society you are dealing with. Also, let's not fail for the easy trap of the great freedom in england and the lack of freedom in india, china, south africa, etc. It is always easy to be clean if you throw your garbage on the neighbour yard.

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## Pompey Bum

Grrrrr. Told you I haven't slept.

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## Pompey Bum

> Ok I think what I've been driving at is that Christian adage, let him without sin cast the first stone. (not Pompey but western Governments and commentators I hasten to say.) America has been stone chucker in chief for a very long time, so I do think it is justifiable to point out its own similar wrongs when discussing Cuba. Also pertinent is - Do not judge lest ye be judged, who guards the guards and pot,kettle, black.


No we are not driving at that adage. Jesus was defending a woman from a crowd that was going to murder her, not enabling her murders by saying, "Oh, it's all right. I mean, I'm going to bring the Apocalypse, right? I mean, who am I to judge? Cast away!" You may put faith in any saying you like and interpret it accordingly, but unless you've got a real point to make, the argument's over (which I wouldn't mind since I've been up all night and I need to decide whether to go to sleep or make breakfast).

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## Pompey Bum

> Justification is another argument - I suspect I may have to agree with you there.


Justification is by Grace alone. (So just stop trying.  :Smile: )




> How many rights and wrongs make a right? is it 3:1?


Here you go, man. Nighty-night. 

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/...s-Make-a-Right

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## Pompey Bum

> But yeah, the point is that there is no society perfectly free (it is the objective and in your question it was already stabilished) and the form - either by individual efforts or by public efforts or both - it will be achived depends on the state of the society you are dealing with.


Fidel Castro tortured and murdered dissidents because it gave him more power if he extirminated their ideas. It is circular to argue that the state to which he and Batista reduced Cuba proves that Cuban society was at a state in which murder and torture were necessary components. They weren't. They were just conveniences to which two killers availed themselves (three if you count Raul). 

Oh hell, I may as well have breakfast now.

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## YesNo

> There is also freedom not to speak I hope.


That's a good point. Free speech also includes the freedom not to speak even if one is taunted or bullied to respond. That actually shows a lot of emotional control.

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## Pompey Bum

Stop taunting Prendrelemick!

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## JCamilo

> Fidel Castro tortured and murdered dissidents because it gave him more power if he extirminated their ideas. It is circular to argue that the state to which he and Batista reduced Cuba proves that Cuban society was at a state in which murder and torture were necessary components. They weren't. They were just conveniences to which two killers availed themselves (three if you count Raul). 
> 
> Oh hell, I may as well have breakfast now.


Well, Fidel was an inteligent man, I do not think he ever believed he killed people to kill ideas ,rather the men who fought for ideas that he saw were against his vision of Revolution. I do not think it is necessary to be very bright to not insist in killing ideas, but maybe you are just hungry when you wrote  :Biggrin: 

Fidel, as most revolutionaries, never stop fighting. In the case of Cuba, of course, they had to keep fighting for much longer than necessary. That was his mindset, sort like those former athletes who keep trash talking to each other on TV - they keep playing. I think his logic was more in like "It is illegal to be against us" and with time this softned a lot. He was of course contraditory, his ideal is one thing, his pratical side another. I do not enjoy, aprove, defend (if I justify, this does not mean I think the justification make it ethical, only helps me to understand why) torture or murder, but the overal simplification of Fidel as Hero or Monster is a mistake. He was both.

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## Pompey Bum

> Well, Fidel was an inteligent man, I do not think he ever believed he killed people to kill ideas ,rather the men who fought for ideas that he saw were against his vision of Revolution.


Yes, by killing them. But when you exterminate dissident journalists you also exterminate their ideas. Fewer ideas, fewer dissidents, more power for his family. He was an intelligent man, though, and a cultured one. Pol Pot would have had him butchered. 




> Fidel, as most revolutionaries, never stop fighting. In the case of Cuba, of course, they had to keep fighting for much longer than necessary. That was his mindset, sort like those former athletes who keep trash talking to each other on TV - they keep playing.


It was probably more like the idea of permanent revolution, which was then being practiced by Mao. That's another good way to stay in power indefinitely.




> I think his logic was more in like "It is illegal to be against us" and with time this softned a lot.


According to ABC's This Week with George Stephanopolis (a sympathetic liberal news program), the repression of dissidents has actually worsened since Raul has been in charge. Apparently the only only thing that's softened has been American foreign policy. The party may be over though. We'll see. 




> He was of course contraditory, his ideal is one thing, his pratical side another. I do not enjoy, aprove, defend (if I justify, this does not mean I think the justification make it ethical, only helps me to understand why) torture or murder, but the overal simplification of Fidel as Hero or Monster is a mistake. He was both.


Fine, to understand is not to condone. But Mao was (and still is) a hero to millions, and he was one of the greatest monsters in history. Being both means nothing. It is important to speak the truth about what Castro was. Mao, too. People should know. 

Did I tell you I was conceived on the night Batista fell? It's a funny thing to know, but I do.

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## Red Terror

> Fidel Castro tortured and murdered dissidents because it gave him more power if he extirminated their ideas. It is circular to argue that the state to which he and Batista reduced Cuba proves that Cuban society was at a state in which murder and torture were necessary components. They weren't. They were just conveniences to which two killers availed themselves (three if you count Raul). 
> 
> Oh hell, I may as well have breakfast now.


Where is your proof that Castro tortured anybody??? You got your "proof" from some corporate news outlet or the U.S. government??? ... Oh, the same people who were loudly claiming Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and American troops would be welcomed as liberators??? Nice propaganda!!!



Read, pause, and reflect Dr. Michael Parenti's ingenious observations!

Excerpt From his book *Blackshirts And Reds*:

A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was George Orwell. In the middle of World War II, as the Soviet Union was fighting for its life against the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad, Orwell announced that a willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectuals point of view is really dangerous (Monthly Review, 5/83). Safely ensconced within a virulently anticommunist society, Orwell (with Orwellian doublethink) characterized the condemnation of communism as a lonely courageous act of defiance. Today, his ideological progeny are still at it, offering themselves as intrepid left critics of the Left, waging a valiant struggle against imaginary Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist hordes.

Sorely lacking within the U.S. Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplishwhile feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandelas African National Congress in South Africa.
Left anticommunists remained studiously unimpressed by the dramatic gains won by masses of previously impoverished people under communism. Some were even scornful of such accomplishments. I recall how in Burlington Vermont, in 1971, the noted anticommunist anarchist, Murray Bookchin, derisively referred to my concern for the poor little children who got fed under communism (his words).

But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic, cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this pure socialism view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.
The pure socialists ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little room for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they feel betrayed by this or that revolution.
The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialismnot created from ones imagination but developed through actual historical experiencecould have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not. As the political philosopher Carl Shames argued:

How do [the left critics] know that the fundamental problem was the nature of the ruling [revolutionary] parties rather than, say, the global concentration of capital that is destroying all independent economies and putting an end to national sovereignty everywhere? And to the extent that it was, where did this nature come from? Was this nature disembodied, disconnected from the fabric of the society itself, from the social relations impacting on it? . . . Thousands of examples could be found in which the centralization of power was a necessary choice in securing and protecting socialist relations. In my observation [of existing communist societies], the positive of socialism and the negative of bureaucracy, authoritarianism and tyranny interpenetrated in virtually every sphere of life. (Carl Shames, correspondence to me, 1/15/92.)

The pure socialists regularly blame the Left itself for every defeat it suffers. Their second-guessing is endless. So we hear that revolutionary struggles fail because their leaders wait too long or act too soon, are too timid or too impulsive, too stubborn or too easily swayed. We hear that revolutionary leaders are compromising or adventuristic, bureaucratic or opportunistic, rigidly organized or insufficiently organized, undemocratic or failing to provide strong leadership. But always the leaders fail because they do not put their trust in the direct actions of the workers, who apparently would withstand and overcome every adversity if only given the kind of leadership available from the left critics own groupuscule. Unfortunately, the critics seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country.
Tony Febbo questioned this blame-the-leadership syndrome of the pure socialists:

It occurs to me that when people as smart, different, dedicated and heroic as Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Ho Chi Minh and Robert Mugabeand the millions of heroic people who followed and fought with themall end up more or less in the same place, then something bigger is at work than who made what decision at what meeting. Or even what size houses they went home to after the meeting. . . . These leaders werent in a vacuum. They were in a whirlwind. And the suction, the force, the power that was twirling them around has spun and left this globe mangled for more than 900 years. And to blame this or that theory or this or that leader is a simple-minded substitute for the kind of analysis that Marxists [should make]. (Guardian, 11/13/91) 

To be sure, the pure socialists are not entirely without specific agendas for building the revolution. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, an ultra-left group in that country called for direct worker ownership of the factories. The armed workers would take control of production without benefit of managers, state planners, bureaucrats, or a formal military. While undeniably appealing, this worker syndicalism denies the necessities of state power. Under such an arrangement, the Nicaraguan revolution would not have lasted two months against the U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution that savaged the country. It would have been unable to mobilize enough resources to field an army, take security measures, or build and coordinate economic programs and human services on a national scale.

Decentralization vs. Survival
For a peoples revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the societys institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyones liking, not in Soviet Russia in 1917, nor in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1980.

Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872-73 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdicated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta), Engels writes. [E]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separation from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack [against bourgeois forces]. It was the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.

Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgencywhich may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack. One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus. Thus, in May 1921, the same Lenin who had encouraged the practice of internal party democracy and struggled against Trotsky in order to give the trade unions a greater measure of autonomy, now called for an end to the Workers Opposition and other factional groups within the party. The time has come, he told an enthusiastically concurring Tenth Party Congress, to put an end to opposition, to put a lid on it: we have had enough opposition. Open disputes and conflicting tendencies within and without the party, the communists concluded, created an appearance of division and weakness that invited attack by formidable foes.

Only a month earlier, in April 1921, Lenin had called for more worker representation on the partys Central Committee. In short, he had become not anti-worker but anti-opposition. Here was a social revolutionlike every otherthat was not allowed to develop its political and material life in an unhindered way.
By the late 1920s, the Soviets faced the choice of (a) moving in a still more centralized direction with a command economy and forced agrarian collectivization and full-speed industrialization under a commandist, autocratic party leadership, the road taken by Stalin, or (b) moving in a liberalized direction, allowing more political diversity, more autonomy for labor unions and other organizations, more open debate and criticism, greater autonomy among the various Soviet republics, a sector of privately owned small businesses, independent agricultural development by the peasantry, greater emphasis on consumer goods, and less effort given to the kind of capital accumulation needed to build a strong military-industrial base.

The latter course, I believe, would have produced a more comfortable, more humane and serviceable society. Siege socialism would have given way to worker-consumer socialism. The only problem is that the country would have risked being incapable of withstanding the Nazi onslaught. Instead, the Soviet Union embarked upon a rigorous, forced industrialization. This policy has often been mentioned as one of the wrongs perpetrated by Stalin upon his people. It consisted mostly of building, within a decade, an entirely new, huge industrial base east of the Urals in the middle of the barren steppes, the biggest steel complex in Europe, in anticipation of an invasion from the West. Money was spent like water, men froze, hungered and suffered but the construction went on with a disregard for individuals and a mass heroism seldom paralleled in history.
Stalins prophecy that the Soviet Union had only ten years to do what the British had done in a century proved correct. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, that same industrial base, safely ensconced thousands of miles from the front, produced the weapons of war that eventually turned the tide. The cost of this survival included 22 million Soviets who perished in the war and immeasurable devastation and suffering, the effects of which would distort Soviet society for decades afterward.
All this is not to say that everything Stalin did was of historical necessity. The exigencies of revolutionary survival did not make inevitable the heartless execution of hundreds of Old Bolshevik leaders, the personality cult of a supreme leader who claimed every revolutionary gain as his own achievement, the suppression of party political life through terror, the eventual silencing of debate regarding the pace of industrialization and collectivization, the ideological regulation of all intellectual and cultural life, and the mass deportations of suspect nationalities.

The transforming effects of counterrevolutionary attack have been felt in other countries. A Sandinista military officer I met in Vienna in 1986 noted that Nicaraguans were not a warrior people but they had to learn to fight because they faced a destructive, U.S.-sponsored mercenary war. She bemoaned the fact that war and embargo forced her country to postpone much of its socio-economic agenda. As with Nicaragua, so with Mozambique, Angola and numerous other countries in which U.S.-financed mercenary forces destroyed farmlands, villages, health centers, and power stations, while killing or starving hundreds of thousandsthe revolutionary baby was strangled in its crib or mercilessly bled beyond recognition. This reality ought to earn at least as much recognition as the suppression of dissidents in this or that revolutionary society.

The overthrow of Eastern European and Soviet communist governments was cheered by many left intellectuals. Now democracy would have its day. The people would be free from the yoke of communism and the U.S. Left would be free from the albatross of existing communism, or as left theorist Richard Lichtman put it, liberated from the incubus of the Soviet Union and the succubus of Communist China.
In fact, the capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe seriously weakened the numerous Third World liberation struggles that had received aid from the Soviet Union and brought a whole new crop of right-wing governments into existence, ones that now worked hand-in-glove with U.S. global counterrevolutionaries around the globe.

In addition, the overthrow of communism gave the green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, no longer restrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people have won over the years. Now that the free market, in its meanest form, is emerging triumphant in the East, so will it prevail in the West. Capitalism with a human face is being replaced by capitalism in your face. As Richard Levins put it, So in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies had held at bay (Monthly Review, 9/96).
Having never understood the role that existing communist powers played in tempering the worst impulses of Western capitalism, and having perceived communism as nothing but an unmitigated evil, the left anticommunists did not anticipate the losses that were to come. Some of them still don't get it.

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## Ecurb

It's easy for us Americans to criticize the evil acts committed by others (like Castro). Battling our own evils is more difficult, but, potentially, more effective. We Americans may actually be able to stop drone assassinations, free some of the 2 million citizens currently imprisoned in our country, and prevent our country from torturing people.

This neither ameliorates nor justifies any of the wicked acts by which Castro (or other foreign dictators) repressed people. Nonetheless, perhaps caring for our own wounds is more noble than picking at the scabs of other people's.

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## Ecurb

duplicate

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## Pompey Bum

> It's easy for us Americans to criticize the evil acts committed by others (like Castro). Battling our own evils is more difficult, but, potentially, more effective. We Americans may actually be able to stop drone assassinations, free some of the 2 million citizens currently imprisoned in our country, and prevent our country from torturing people.


I agree in principle that looking to our own affairs ought to be a priority. We are however linked to Cuba by treaty and (whether anyone likes it or not) by proximate geography and therefore as a matter of national security. Our affairs and their affairs are awkwardly joined at the hip. The diplomatic situation may or may not survive the current political tides. But it is also likely that your wishlist of curbing drone strikes and emptying the prisons will be tossed into the fire and go up in smoke. But Trump has been making some noise recently about not torturing people, which I see as a step in the right direction. If we continue in the current thaw with Cuba, it is at least conceivable that stronger economic ties could provide some leverage in getting Raul to behave. That didn't work with China, though, and I'm not holding my breath.




> Nonetheless, perhaps caring for our own wounds is more noble than picking at the scabs of other people's.


It's important to speak truth to history. And if the human rights situation truly is getting worse under Raul Castro, then we should acknowledge it. We overlook an awful lot with China, though, (or whoever looks doesn't talk), so again I am not optimistic. Right now a lot depends on how much pressure Trump wants to put on Cuba over human rights in order to get other kinds of concessions. Also remember that Raul is 85. There's going to have to be another change pretty soon.

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## Ecurb

As a Christian, Pompey, you probably believe that we are all evil, and in need of redemption. Neruda's poem seems a more fitting tribute to Fidel Castro's death (atrocities notwithstanding) than screeds about his wicked deeds. Fidel Castro was a seminal figure in the world, and beloved of many (although hated by many, as well, with good reason). History has plenty of time to write the true story. His story is a human story, filled with ambition and courage, as well as narcissism, lack of compassion, and violence. Perhaps his death is a time to reflect on his humanity -- no longer with us -- rather than his inhumanity, which, upon his demise, is eternal.

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## seerseenbyseein

I seem to recall that Pope John Paul went to Cuba before he died and sat down with Castro and the two of them had a heart to heart talk. I recall also that when that same (great) pope went to Austria and the former Nazi who was then prime minister (or do they call the high guy president too?) Kurt Something or Other, tried to chum up to him, John walked away from him.

Pompey, I think John Paul knew Castro a hell of a lot better than you do.

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## Pompey Bum

> As a Christian, Pompey, you probably believe that we are all evil, and in need of redemption. Neruda's poem seems a more fitting tribute to Fidel Castro's death (atrocities notwithstanding) than screeds about his wicked deeds. Fidel Castro was a seminal figure in the world, and beloved of many (although hated by many, as well, with good reason). History has plenty of time to write the true story. His story is a human story, filled with ambition and courage, as well as narcissism, lack of compassion, and violence. Perhaps his death is a time to reflect on his humanity -- no longer with us -- rather than his inhumanity, which, upon his demise, is eternal.


Actually my view is that the human potential for evil grows exponentially when it is hidden in dark places. Ignoring Castro's crimes only serves the next torturer-killer at the expense of the next victims. The same is true of Batista. It has nothing to do with hate. It has to do with facing the things human beings are capable of doing to one another without flinching or without pretending. It is easier, of course, to turn one's head and sing a happy song. But that is neither a just approach nor, I think, a particularly safe one.




> Pompey, I think John Paul knew Castro a hell of a lot better than you do.


Okay. I mean, I find your opinion sanctimonious and irrelevant, but you are certainly welcome to it.

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## seerseenbyseein

> Actually my view is that the human potential for evil grows exponentially when it is hidden in dark places. Ignoring Castro's crimes only serves the next torturer-killer at the expense of the next victims. The same is true of Batista. It has nothing to do with hate. It has to do with facing the things human beings are capable of doing to one another without without pretending. It is easier, of course, to turn one's head and sing a happy song. But that is neither a just approach nor, I think, a particularly safe one.
> 
> 
> 
> Okay. I mean, I find your opinion sanctimonious and irrelevant, but you are certainly welcome to it.


Sanctimonious? Goodness man, you're the Christian, not me! I respect John Paul not because he was a Catholic pope; the vibration of the man spoke and still speaks to me. 

As for Castro--I have to go on the same gut feeling grounds, mainly because he has been so demonized so long as a matter of national policy in this country and many others...I mean, do I take Alex Jones's word for it or my own tummy's?

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## YesNo

> Where is your proof that Castro tortured anybody??? You got your "proof" from some corporate news outlet or the U.S. government??? ... Oh, the same people who were loudly claiming Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and American troops would be welcomed as liberators??? Nice propaganda!!!


I would like to see some evidence as well. I have been wondering for decades why the US has not established more open relationships with Cuba, but my knowledge of the events is sketchy and my trust in what I hear is low anyway.

It seemed clear to me that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when the Bush administration kept insisting it did and that is because the UN inspectors could not find those weapons. That should have been the end of the matter, but instead we had a war.

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## Dreamwoven

I would second YesNo's post immediately above.

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## Pompey Bum

DW: I no longer respond to Red Terror's posts because I believe he is a minor. I assume adults can handle political discussions, but I don't want to involve children. I should really put him on my ignore list. There, I just did.

YesNo is on my ignore list, too. That means I normally can't see his posts. I see a white bar instead, although there is a button that allows me to view the post if I suspect he is up to something (as he is now). He knows all this. He's just trying to make a fight because he is angry with me. 

Castro's human rights record is well documented. I'll leave a couple of links for you, but you could easily do this for yourself. The real issue not whether the abuses occurred but if they were justified given Castro's achievements and historical context. My view is that they were not, and I have given my reasons above ad nauseam. You are obviously free to make up your own mind. I have no problem with disagreeing with you or anyone else on the point. But I am not going to remain silent. 

https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/11/26/...ord-repression

http://www.therealcuba.com/?page_id=55

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/o...129-story.html

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## Red Terror

The link to human rights watch does not even mention torture. It mentions the following: "During Castros rule, thousands of Cubans were incarcerated in abysmal prisons, thousands more were harassed and intimidated, and entire generations were denied basic political freedoms." This list is hardly indicative of genocide! 

The second one where it shows Colonel Rojas's execution is baloney. Colonel Rojas was a murderer and tortured people. He was sentenced to death at a summary trial after the battle of Santa Clara in which Che presided.

The third link of the *Chicago Tribune* also does not mention torture and is an opinion piece by a right-wing nutjob columnist. Bye-bye!!!




> DW: I no longer respond to Red Terror's posts because I believe he is a minor. I assume adults can handle political discussions, but I don't want to involve children. I should really put him on my ignore list. There, I just did.
> 
> YesNo is on my ignore list, too. That means I normally can't see his posts. I see a white bar instead, although there is a button that allows me to view the post if I suspect he is up to something (as he is now). He knows all this. He's just trying to make a fight now because he is angry with me. 
> 
> Castro's human rights record is well documented. I'll leave a couple of links for you, but you could easily do this for yourself. The real issue not whether the abuses occurred but if they were justified given Castro's achievements and historical context. My view is that they were not, and I have given my reasons above ad nauseam. You are obviously free to make up your own mind. I have no problem with disagreeing with you or anyone else on the point. But I am not going to remain silent. 
> 
> https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/11/26/...ord-repression
> 
> http://www.therealcuba.com/?page_id=55
> ...

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## Dreamwoven

> DW: I no longer respond to Red Terror's posts because I believe he is a minor. I assume adults can handle political discussions, but I don't want to involve children. I should really put him on my ignore list. There, I just did.
> 
> YesNo is on my ignore list, too. That means I normally can't see his posts. I see a white bar instead, although there is a button that allows me to view the post if I suspect he is up to something (as he is now). He knows all this. He's just trying to make a fight now because he is angry with me. 
> 
> Castro's human rights record is well documented. I'll leave a couple of links for you, but you could easily do this for yourself. The real issue not whether the abuses occurred but if they were justified given Castro's achievements and historical context. My view is that they were not, and I have given my reasons above ad nauseam. You are obviously free to make up your own mind. I have no problem with disagreeing with you or anyone else on the point. But I am not going to remain silent. 
> 
> https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/11/26/...ord-repression
> 
> http://www.therealcuba.com/?page_id=55
> ...


I didn't know there was such a thing as an ignore list, still less how it works. Not sure what the point of it would be.

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## Pompey Bum

> I didn't know there was such a thing as an ignore list, still less how it works. Not sure what the point of it would be.


It gets rid of people you don't wish to know anymore. You always have the option of looking, but after a while you stop caring--you just let them fuss. It's actually quite effective.

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## Ecurb

> Actually my view is that the human potential for evil grows exponentially when it is hidden in dark places. Ignoring Castro's crimes only serves the next torturer-killer at the expense of the next victims. The same is true of Batista. It has nothing to do with hate. It has to do with facing the things human beings are capable of doing to one another without flinching or without pretending. It is easier, of course, to turn one's head and sing a happy song. But that is neither a just approach nor, I think, a particularly safe one.
> 
> .


That's reasonable. However, it's also reasonable to think "the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with the bones." To concentrate on one aspect of Castro's political career (whether it is his brutal dictatorship or courageous revolution) and ignore the other seems like political opportunism, and his death might not be the proper time for that. Some ignore Castro's brutality; others prefer to ignore his charisma and courage. 

(Actually, "brutality" is the wrong word, but I didn't change it because word choice might stimulate discussion. "Brutes" kill people, but, generally, they are not evil when they do. Humans are capable of evil, not brutes. Also, I agree that we shouldn't ignore evil -- but we can and should admire virtues like courage, while deploring sin. It's fair to castigate Castro, but the man is dead, and it's reasonable to look back at the man as a complex human -- narcissistic, violent and power-hungry, but brave and capable.)

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## Pompey Bum

> DW: I no longer respond to Red Terror's posts because I believe he is a minor. I assume adults can handle political discussions, but I don't want to involve children. I should really put him on my ignore list. There, I just did.
> 
> YesNo is on my ignore list, too. That means I normally can't see his posts. I see a white bar instead, although there is a button that allows me to view the post if I suspect he is up to something (as he is now). He knows all this. He's just trying to make a fight now because he is angry with me. 
> 
> Castro's human rights record is well documented. I'll leave a couple of links for you, but you could easily do this for yourself. The real issue not whether the abuses occurred but if they were justified given Castro's achievements and historical context. My view is that they were not, and I have given my reasons above ad nauseam. You are obviously free to make up your own mind. I have no problem with disagreeing with you or anyone else on the point. But I am not going to remain silent. 
> 
> https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/11/26/...ord-repression
> 
> http://www.therealcuba.com/?page_id=55
> ...





> I didn't know there was such a thing as an ignore list, still less how it works. Not sure what the point of it would be.





> It gets rid of people you don't wish to know anymore. You always have the option of looking, but after a while you stop caring--you just let them fuss. It's actually quite effective.


Case in point: I just checked out how my newest ignore was handling things. He wanted to know about torture-- fair enough and my bad. Here is an article from the New York Times about the memoirs of the Cuban poet Armando Valladares, an eyewitness and torture victim during 22 hellish years in Castro's prisons:

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/08/bo...pagewanted=all

Just do your own search, DW. It's not really a controversy.

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## Pompey Bum

> That's reasonable. However, it's also reasonable to think "the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with the bones." To concentrate on one aspect of Castro's political career (whether it is his brutal dictatorship or courageous revolution) and ignore the other seems like political opportunism, and his death might not be the proper time for that. Some ignore Castro's brutality; others prefer to ignore his charisma and courage. 
> 
> (Actually, "brutality" is the wrong word, but I didn't change it because word choice might stimulate discussion. "Brutes" kill people, but, generally, they are not evil when they do. Humans are capable of evil, not brutes. Also, I agree that we shouldn't ignore evil -- but we can and should admire virtues like courage, while deploring sin. It's fair to castigate Castro, but the man is dead, and it's reasonable to look back at the man as a complex human -- narcissistic, violent and power-hungry, but brave and capable.)


We are all free to admire who we like. You and I are blessed to live in a country where our free speech is consitutionally secured. You may express your opinions about the things in Castro you find admirable. I refuse to be silent about his human rights abuses. I think we can both live with that.

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## Ecurb

> We are all free to admire who we like. You and I are blessed to Live in a country where our free speech consitutionally secured. You may express your opinions about the things in Castro you find admirable. I refuse to be silent about his human rights abuses. I think we can both live with that.


Yes; and we can (perhaps) agree that Neruda can write his poem, or that Wordsworth could write "bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven." Wordsworth's poem was about the French Revolution -- as replete with blood and hope as the more recent revolution in Cuba.

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## Pompey Bum

> Yes; and we can (perhaps) agree that Neruda can write his poem, or that Wordsworth could write "bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven." Wordsworth's poem was about the French Revolution -- as replete with blood and hope as the more recent revolution in Cuba.


I don't understand. Are you under the impression I've said Neruda couldn't write his poem? Have you read the thread? I don't think I've even mentioned Neruda till now.

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## Red Terror

Pompey Bum's link to the *N.Y. Times* is strictly for entertainment purposes, folks! ---- Not to be taken seriously! I mean really!!! Are we supposed to be gullible enough to swallow that toilet paper of record the _N.Y. Times_??? After all the lies and filth they have churned out for decades, are we now suppose to take them seriously??? I don't read the_ N.Y. Times_ for the truth. I read it for the lies.

I wikied him. He worked for the secret police of dictator Batista and was arrested for terrorism-related offenses. Some poet he is since I never even heard of him. He's not even mentioned in Professor Harold Bloom's master list of the Western Canon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armando_Valladares

Look at the poetaster Armando Vallardes today. He looks like a daper old man. He does not look like he's tortured. Where are the scars??? He still has his teeth. Come on, dude!!!



Look at him when he was released from prison. He does not look like the shell of a man that has undergone hell on earth!!!








> Case in point: I just checked out how my newest ignore was handling things. He wanted to know about torture-- fair enough and my bad. Here is an article from the New York Times about the memoirs of the Cuban poet Armando Valladares, an eyewitness and torture victim during of 22 hellish years in Castro's prisons:
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/08/bo...pagewanted=all
> 
> Just do your own search, DW. It's not really a controversy.

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## Red Terror

Let us take a moment to examine in detail the legacy of the “tyrant” Fidel Castro:


+ Cuba is today the only country in the Americas where child malnourishment does not exist (UNICEF).

+ Cuba has the lowest child mortality rate in the Americas (UNICEF).

+ 130,000 students have graduated from medical school in Cuba since 1961.

+ Cuba has eliminated homelessness (Knoema).

+ 54% of Cuba’s national budget is used for social services.

+ Cuba has the best education system in Latin America.

+ Cuba has sent hundreds of doctors and nurses on medical missions across the Third World.

+ Cuba was the first country to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV (World Health Organization).

If only the Haitian people or the people of the Dominican Republic had such a tyrant ruling their countries. If only the poor in the US and UK had such a tyrant at the head of their respective governments.

When it comes to the accusation that gays were persecuted in Cuba after the revolution, there is no doubt that LGBT rights were non-existent in Cuba in the sixties and for most of the seventies, just as they were non existent throughout much of the world. Homosexuality, for example, was decriminalized in Cuba in 1979, which compares favourably to Scotland and Northern Ireland in the UK, where it was decriminalized in 1980 and 1982 respectively. Moreover, same-sex sexual activity was only made legal across the entire United States in 2003. It is also worth bearing in mind that homosexuality today is criminalized in Saudi Arabia – a close UK and US ally and a society in which women are treated as chattel and people are routinely beheaded – where it is punishable by death.

The fact is that the existence of homophobia in Cuba predated Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution by around five centuries. It was entrenched as part of the cultural values of Cuban society, indeed the cultural values throughout the Americas, courtesy of the Catholic Church. Fidel Castro was a product of those values and to his credit later renounced them, awakening to the justice of LGBT rights. Today his own niece, Mariela Castro, plays an active role in the Cuban LGBT community, leading the country’s annual gay pride parade in Havana last year.

As for torture, meanwhile, the only place on the island of Cuba where this can be found is at the US military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

The key point to be borne in mind when it comes to Cuba and its state of development is that countries and societies do not exist on blank sheets of paper. In the Third World their development cannot be divorced from a real life struggle against the huge obstacles placed in their way by histories of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism, responsible for retarding their progress in service to the exploitation of their human and natural resources.

The legitimacy of the Cuban Revolution lies in its survival in the face of the aforementioned US blockade, designed to starve the country to its knees for daring to refuse to be slaves of global capital. To understand what that would look like all we need do is cast our eyes over to the aforementioned Haiti or Dominican Republic, countries of comparable size located in the same region. Compared to them Cuba stands as a beacon of dignity, social and economic justice, and sustainable development.

Fidel Castro was no dictator. On the contrary, he dedicated his life to resisting Washington’s dictatorship of the Third World. Moreover, as a result of the Cuban Revolution the right to be homeless, illiterate, and to go without healthcare no longer exists in Cuba. In their place have come the most fundamental human rights of all – the right to be educated, to healthcare that is free at the point of need, and the right to live with dignity and pride in being the citizen of a small island that has stood over decades as a beacon of justice in an ocean of injustice.

This, in truth, is the reason ‘they’ despise him. And this, in truth, is why millions of Cubans will come out and pay tribute to his life and legacy on the day of his funeral. For them he will forever be ‘El Comandante’.

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## Ecurb

> I don't understand. Are you under the impression I've said Neruda couldn't write his poem? Have you read the thread? I don't think I've even mentioned Neruda till now.


You clearly support freedom of speech in your posts, and specifically deplored Cuba's lack of such freedom. However, some people (other than you, perhaps) might not be able to appreciate Neruda's poem, or Wordsworth's poem, because the poems fail to condemn tyranny and torture. Some French aristocrats, for example, might NOT think it was "bliss" to be alive in such a dawn, and fail to find amusement in Wordsworth's poem. I wasn't arguing with you, I was simply making that point. 

In the U.S., freedom of speech is limited for Capitalistic reasons, rather than political ones. Copyrights, patents, trademarks and other forms of property law limit our freedom of speech (and often rightly so, in my opinion). However we should recognize such laws for what they are: limits on free expression. 

Red Terror's screed below is typical of communist apologetics. Torture and limits on freedom are OK, as long as some "greater good" is realized. No. They are not. Evil is evil, and breeds more evil. Torturing dissidents did not improve the child mortality rates in Cuba. But even if it did, it would be unacceptable and morally repulsive. 

Nonetheless, heroic and idealistic revolutions remain heroic and idealistic, even when the governments they spawn are neither. Liberty, equality and fraternity are noble goals, however many guillotined heads rolled, or Napoleons terrorized Europe.

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## Pompey Bum

> You clearly support freedom of speech in your posts, and specifically deplored Cuba's lack of such freedom. However, some people (other than you, perhaps) might not be able to appreciate Neruda's poem, or Wordsworth's poem, because the poems fail to condemn tyranny and torture.


I appreciate your balanced approach, but before you give me too much credit ( :Smile: ), I want to assert that appreciating a poem (I don't mean in an aesthetic way) is not the same as recognizing that a poet doesn't have to answer to me in what he or she says. As it happens, I don't know how I feel about this poem from a non-aesthetic point of view. It depends when it was written and what Neruda knew about the Castro regime at the time. Many people had high hopes for Castro in the beginning (apparently including Kennedy). If Neruda's poem reflected that time, then well, it was naive at worst. If he wrote it later, knowing about the human rights abuses, then it is a literary artifact of a useful idiot, and I certainly do not appreciate it. But it would still deserve to be read. It's like a statue of Lenin or Caligula or Nero. Art is still art even when it depicts a homicidal goon.




> In the U.S., freedom of speech is limited for Capitalistic reasons, rather than political ones. Copyrights, patents, trademarks and other forms of property law limit our freedom of speech (and often rightly so, in my opinion). However we should recognize such laws for what they are: limits on free expression.


Yes, and also court gag orders. My opinion is that US copyright laws are excessive and should be scaled back by judicial means. There are other limits, too, based on Mill's Harm Principle. But none of these things are analogous to torturing and murdering political dissidents, as I am sure we agree.

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## YesNo

> The fact is that the existence of homophobia in Cuba predated Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution by around five centuries. It was entrenched as part of the cultural values of Cuban society, indeed the cultural values throughout the Americas, courtesy of the Catholic Church. Fidel Castro was a product of those values and to his credit later renounced them, awakening to the justice of LGBT rights. Today his own niece, Mariela Castro, plays an active role in the Cuban LGBT community, leading the countrys annual gay pride parade in Havana last year.


I don't think the word "homophobia" is appropriate for the problem you are describing since it implies there is a fear involved. The anti-homosexual perspectives as well as the similar antisemitic perspectives are problems with certain cultures. Those cultures just need to get over these things even if it means reinterpreting a few of their sacred texts. 




> As for torture, meanwhile, the only place on the island of Cuba where this can be found is at the US military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.


I have been wondering why we have that detention facility there at all.




> The key point to be borne in mind when it comes to Cuba and its state of development is that countries and societies do not exist on blank sheets of paper. In the Third World their development cannot be divorced from a real life struggle against the huge obstacles placed in their way by histories of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism, responsible for retarding their progress in service to the exploitation of their human and natural resources.
> 
> The legitimacy of the Cuban Revolution lies in its survival in the face of the aforementioned US blockade, designed to starve the country to its knees for daring to refuse to be slaves of global capital. To understand what that would look like all we need do is cast our eyes over to the aforementioned Haiti or Dominican Republic, countries of comparable size located in the same region. Compared to them Cuba stands as a beacon of dignity, social and economic justice, and sustainable development.


I agree that the isolationism practiced by the US against Cuba is the real problem that needs to be addressed.

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## prendrelemick

> I have been wondering why we have that detention facility there at all.


It's an attempt to get round a few annoying legal technicalities.

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## Pompey Bum

It is a nightmare. But once again, that has nothing to do with whether Castro's human rights abuses were justified. There is another logical fallacy called the argumentum ad nauseam, which involves repeating the same failed argument over and over as if that somehow makes it valid. It is especially common on the Internet, where one side or another typically gets frustrated and leaves. We can do better.

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## Pompey Bum

I heard an interesting program on The Federalist Radio Hour (podcast) today called: "How Castro's Political Persecution Destroyed Cuba." They discussed some of these issues, even briefly mentioning Neruda. He was described as a lionizer of Stalin (there was a lot of that going around) but also as someone who wrote a poem in praise of Batista. I don't really know his work, but (to follow up on my discussion with ecurb), those credentials incline me towards the useful idiot hypothesis. Still an artist's ideas can grow so I'll keep an open mind. The show is probably archived if anyone's interested.

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## Red Terror

Apropos to the subject of this thread, I received yesterday the monthly newsletter of Mr. William Blum called *The Anti-Empire Report**. Check it out

*Cuba, Fidel, Socialism … Hasta la victoria siempre!

The most frequent comment I’ve read in the mainstream media concerning Fidel Castro’s death is that he was a “dictator”; almost every heading bore that word. Since the 1959 revolution, the American mainstream media has routinely referred to Cuba as a dictatorship. But just what does Cuba do or lack that makes it a dictatorship?

No “free press”? Apart from the question of how free Western media is (see the preceding essays), if that’s to be the standard, what would happen if Cuba announced that from now on anyone in the country could own any kind of media? How long would it be before CIA money – secret and unlimited CIA money financing all kinds of fronts in Cuba – would own or control almost all the media worth owning or controlling?

Is it “free elections” that Cuba lacks? They regularly have elections at municipal, regional and national levels. They do not have direct election of the president, but neither do Germany or the United Kingdom and many other countries. The Cuban president is chosen by the parliament, The National Assembly of People’s Power. Money plays virtually no role in these elections; neither does party politics, including the Communist Party, since all candidates run as individuals. Again, what is the standard by which Cuban elections are to be judged? Is it that they don’t have private corporations to pour in a billion dollars? Most Americans, if they gave it any thought, might find it difficult to even imagine what a free and democratic election, without great concentrations of corporate money, would look like, or how it would operate. Would Ralph Nader finally be able to get on all 50 state ballots, take part in national television debates, and be able to match the two monopoly parties in media advertising? If that were the case, I think he’d probably win; which is why it’s not the case.

Or perhaps what Cuba lacks is our marvelous “electoral college” system, where the presidential candidate with the most votes is not necessarily the winner. Did we need the latest example of this travesty of democracy to convince us to finally get rid of it? If we really think this system is a good example of democracy why don’t we use it for local and state elections as well?

Is Cuba a dictatorship because it arrests dissidents? Many thousands of anti-war and other protesters have been arrested in the United States in recent years, as in every period in American history. During the Occupy Movement of five years ago more than 7,000 people were arrested, many beaten by police and mistreated while in custody. And remember: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer; virtually without exception, Cuban dissidents have been financed by and aided in other ways by the United States.

Would Washington ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and engaging in repeated meetings with known members of that organization? In recent years the United States has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States. Virtually all of Cuba’s “political prisoners” are such dissidents. *While others may call Cuba’s security policies dictatorship, I call it self-defense.*

https://williamblum.org/aer/read/147


Remember when Vice-President Joe Biden once said, "Mubarak isn't a dictator." Who makes this stuff up??? Read, Pause, Listen and Reflect!!!







“Freedom of the Press” by Leon Trotsky

One point particularly worries Kautsky, the author of a great many books and articles – the freedom of the Press. Is it permissible to suppress newspapers?

During war all institutions and organs of the State and of public opinion become, directly or indirectly, weapons of warfare. This is particularly true of the Press. No government carrying on a serious war will allow publications to exist on its territory which, openly or indirectly, support the enemy. Still more so in a civil war. The nature of the latter is such that each of the struggling sides has in the rear of its armies considerable circles of the population on the side of the enemy. In war, where both success and failure are repaid by death, hostile agents who penetrate into the rear are subject to execution. This is inhumane, but no one ever considered war a school of humanity – still less civil war. Can it be seriously demanded that, during a civil war with the White Guards of Denikin, the publications of parties supporting Denikin should come out unhindered in Moscow and Petrograd? To propose this in the name of the “freedom” of the Press is just the same as, in the name of open dealing, to demand the publication of military secrets. “A besieged city,” wrote a Communard, Arthur Arnould of Paris, “cannot permit within its midst that hopes for its fall should openly be expressed, that the fighters defending it should be incited to treason, that the movements of its troops should be communicated to the enemy. Such was the position of Paris under the Commune.” Such is the position of the Soviet Republic during the two years of its existence.

Let us, however, listen to what Kautsky has to say in this connection.

“The justification of this system (i.e., repressions in connection with the Press) is reduced to the naive idea that an absolute truth (!) exists, and that only the Communists posses it (!). Similarly,” continues Kautsky, “it reduces itself to another point of view, that all writers are by nature liars (!) and that only Communists are fanatics for truth (!). In reality, liars and fanatics for what they consider truth are to be found in all camps.” And so on, and so on, and so on. (Page 176)

In this way, in Kautsky’s eyes, the revolution, in its most acute phase, when it is a question of the life and death of classes, continues as hitherto to be a literary discussion with the object of establishing ... the truth. What profundity! ... Our “truth,” of course, is not absolute. But as in its name we are, at the present moment, shedding our blood, we have neither cause nor possibility to carry on a literary discussion as to the relativity of truth with those who “criticize” us with the help of all forms of arms. Similarly, our problem is not to punish liars and to encourage just men amongst journalists of all shades of opinion, but to throttle the class lie of the bourgeoisie and to achieve the class truth of the proletariat, irrespective of the fact that in both camps there are fanatics and liars.

“The Soviet Government,” Kautsky thunders, “has destroyed the sole remedy that might militate against corruption: the freedom of the Press. Control by means of unlimited freedom of the Press alone could have restrained those bandits and adventurers who will inevitably cling like leeches to every unlimited, uncontrolled power.” (Page 188) And so on.

The Press as a trusty weapon of the struggle with corruption! This liberal recipe sounds particularly pitiful when one remembers the two countries with the greatest “freedom” of the Press – North America and France – which, at the same time, are countries of the most highly developed stage of capitalist corruption.

Feeding on the old scandal of the political ante-rooms of the Russian revolution, Kautsky imagines that without Cadet and Menshevik freedom the Soviet apparatus is honeycombed with “bandits” and “adventurers.” Such was the voice of the Mensheviks a year or eighteen months ago. Now even they will not dare to repeat this. With the help of Soviet control and party selection, the Soviet Government, in the intense atmosphere of the struggle, has dealt with the bandits and adventurers who appeared on the surface at the moment of the revolution incomparably better than any government whatsoever, at any time whatsoever.

We are fighting. We are fighting a life-and-death struggle. The Press is a weapon not of an abstract society, but of two irreconcilable, armed and contending sides. We are destroying the Press of the counter-revolution, just as we destroyed its fortified positions, its stores, its communication, and its intelligence system. Are we depriving ourselves of Cadet and Menshevik criticisms of the corruption of the working class? In return we are victoriously destroying the very foundations of capitalist corruption.

But Kautsky goes further to develop his theme. He complains that we suppress the newspapers of the SRs and the Mensheviks, and even – such things have been known – arrest their leaders. Are we not dealing here with “shades of opinion” in the proletarian or the Socialist movement? The scholastic pedant does not see facts beyond his accustomed words. The Mensheviks and SRs for him are simply tendencies in Socialism, whereas, in the course of the revolution, they have been transformed into an organization which works in active co-operation with the counter-revolution and carries on against us an open war. The army of Kolchak was organized by Socialist Revolutionaries (how that name savours to-day of the charlatan!), and was supported by Mensheviks. Both carried on – and carry on – against us, for a year and a half, a war on the Northern front. The Mensheviks who rule the Caucasus, formerly the allies of Hohenzollern, and to-day the allies of Lloyd George, arrested and shot Bolsheviks hand in hand with German and British officers. The Mensheviks and S.R.s of the Kuban Rada organized the army of Denikin. The Esthonian Mensheviks who participate in their government were directly concerned in the last advance of Yudenich against Petrograd. Such are these “tendencies” in the Socialist movement. Kautsky considers that one can be in a state of open and civil war with the Mensheviks and SRs, who, with the help of the troops they themselves have organized for Yudenich, Kolchak and Denikin, are fighting for their “shade of opinions” in Socialism, and at the same time to allow those innocent “shades of opinion” freedom of the Press in our rear. If the dispute with the SRs and the Mensheviks could be settled by means of persuasion and voting – that is, if there were not behind their backs the Russian and foreign imperialists – there would be no civil war.

Kautsky, of course, is ready to “condemn” – an extra drop of ink – the blockade, and the Entente support of Denikin, and the White Terror. But in his high impartiality he cannot refuse the latter certain extenuating circumstances. The White Terror, you see, does not infringe their own principles, while the Bolsheviks, making use of the Red Terror, betray the principle of “the sacredness of human life which they themselves proclaimed.” (Page 210)

What is the meaning of the principle of the sacredness of human life in practice, and in what does it differ from the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” Kautsky does not explain. When a murderer raises his knife over a child, may one kill the murderer to save the child? Will not thereby the principle of the “sacredness of human life” be infringed? May one kill the murderer to save oneself? Is an insurrection of oppressed slaves against their masters permissible? Is it permissible to purchase one’s freedom at the cost of the life of one’s jailers? If human life in general is sacred and inviolable, we must deny ourselves not only the use of terror, not only war, but also revolution itself. Kautsky simply does not realize the counter-revolutionary meaning of the “principle” which he attempts to force upon us. Elsewhere we shall see that Kautsky accuses us of concluding the Brest-Litovsk peace: in his opinion we ought to have continued war. But what then becomes of the sacredness of human life? Does life cease to be sacred when it is a question of people talking another language, or does Kautsky consider that mass murders organized on principles of strategy and tactics are not murders at all? Truly it is difficult to put forward in our age a principle more hypocritical and more stupid. As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.

We used to fight against the death penalty introduced by Kerensky, because that penalty was inflicted by the courts-martial of the old army on soldiers who refused to continue the imperialist war. We tore this weapon out of the hands of the old courts-martial, destroyed the courts-martial themselves, and demobilized the old army which had brought them forth. Destroying in the Red Army, and generally throughout the country, counter-revolutionary conspirators who strive by means of insurrections, murders, and disorganization, to restore the old regime, we are acting in accordance with the iron laws of a war in which we desire to guarantee our victory.

If it is a question of seeking formal contradictions, then obviously we must do so on the side of the White Terror, which is the weapon of classes which consider themselves “Christian,” patronize idealist philosophy, and are firmly convinced that the individuality (their own) is an end-in-itself. As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the “sacredness of human life.” We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.

There is another difference between the White Terror and the Red, which Kautsky to-day ignores, but which in the eyes of a Marxist is of decisive significance. The White Terror is the weapon of the historically reactionary class. When we exposed the futility of the repressions of the bourgeois State against the proletariat, we never denied that by arrests and executions the ruling class, under certain conditions, might temporarily retard the development of the social revolution. But we were convinced that they would not be able to bring it to a halt. We relied on the fact that the proletariat is the historically rising class, and that bourgeois society could not develop without increasing the forces of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie to-day is a falling class. It not only no longer plays an essential part in production, but by its imperialist methods of appropriation is destroying the economic structure of the world and human culture generally. Nevertheless, the historical persistence of the bourgeoisie is colossal. It holds to power, and does not wish to abandon it. Thereby it threatens to drag after it into the abyss the whole of society. We are forced to tear it off, to chop it away. The Red Terror is a weapon utilized against a class, doomed to destruction, which does not wish to perish. If the White Terror can only retard the historical rise of the proletariat, the Red Terror hastens the destruction of the bourgeoisie. This hastening – a pure question of acceleration – is at certain periods of decisive importance. Without the Red Terror, the Russian bourgeoisie, together with the world bourgeoisie, would throttle us long before the coming of the revolution in Europe. One must be blind not to see this, or a swindler to deny it.

The man who recognizes the revolutionary historic importance of the very fact of the existence of the Soviet system must also sanction the Red Terror. Kautsky, who, during the last two years, has covered mountains of paper with polemics against Communism and Terrorism, is obliged, at the end of his pamphlet, to recognize the facts, and unexpectedly to admit that the Russian Soviet Government is to-day the most important factor in the world revolution. “However one regards the Bolshevik methods,” he writes, “the fact that a proletarian government in a large country has not only reached power, but has retained it for two years up to the present time, amidst great difficulties, extraordinarily increases the sense of power amongst the proletariat of all countries. For the actual revolution the Bolsheviks have thereby accomplished a great work – grosses geleistet. (Page 233)

This announcement stuns us as a completely unexpected recognition of historical truth from a quarter whence we had long since ceased to await it. The Bolsheviks have accomplished a great historical task by existing for two years against the united capitalist world. But the Bolsheviks held out not only by ideas, but by the sword. Kautsky’s admission is an involuntary sanctioning of the methods of the Red Terror, and at the same time the most effective condemnation of his own critical concoction.







> I heard an interesting program on The Federalist Radio Hour (podcast) today called: "How Castro's Political Persecution Destroyed Cuba." They discussed some of these issues, even briefly mentioning Neruda. He was described as a lionizer of Stalin (there was a lot of that going around) but also as someone who wrote a poem in praise of Batista. I don't really know his work, but (to follow up on my discussion with ecurb), those credentials incline me towards the useful idiot hypothesis. Still, an artist's deas can grow so I'll keep an open mind. The show is probably archived if anyone's interested.

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## Press

An excellent read, Red Terror, more than a few valid points too. Rest in Peace, Senor Castro.

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## Dreamwoven

I agree with Press, it is very helpful. You might like to look at this analysis, from which I learned a few useful hints: https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/0...-fidel-castro/

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## YesNo

> I agree with Press, it is very helpful. You might like to look at this analysis, from which I learned a few useful hints: https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/0...-fidel-castro/


Good article.

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## Red Terror

> I agree with Press, it is very helpful. You might like to look at this analysis, from which I learned a few useful hints: https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/0...-fidel-castro/


Yeah it is very good. Very Solid ...

Remember when Vice-President Joe Biden once said, "Mubarak isn't a dictator." Who makes this stuff up???

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## Dreamwoven

I guess he would say the same for Saudi Arabia. Much of American policy is about securing the oil resources of the Middle East.

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## Red Terror

*The American Experience: Fidel Castro* by PBS in America

There are some interesting things in this documentary like when it is said that Castro's mother never forgave him for nationalizing the family landed estate and distributing it to peasants.

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## Dreamwoven

> I guess he would say the same for Saudi Arabia. Much of American policy is about securing the oil resources of the Middle East.


Interesting, Consortium News has an item exactly on Saudi Arabia: https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/0...a-accountable/

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## YesNo

I have only had time to listen to a third of Red Terror's link about Castro, but it was interesting. Also, Dreamwoven's link to a Consortium News article about Saudi Arabia helped me to adjust my perspective on the Sunnis and the Shiites.

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