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Robbed of an Illusion
Two weeks ago, three men were taken out of their cells to a prison yard and executed by an official firing squad. They were Lorenzo Castillo, Barbaro Garcia and Jorge Isaac. Their families were notified after their bodies were buried under cement.
Twelve days earlier, the three, along with eleven others, had hijacked a ferry, its crew and fifty passengers. The ferry ran out of fuel in the Florida Straits and the hijackers were persuaded by officers on two Cuban Coast Guard patrol boats to let them tow the ferry back to Cuba’s Mariel port for refuelling. However, after a short standoff, security forces regained control and captured the hijackers who were armed with a pistol and some knives. None of the passengers were injured.
It was the third hijacking in three weeks. A few months ago seventy-five dissidents were arrested in a sting operation, which involved the Cuban intelligence services infiltrating their groups and exposing their ties with the principal US diplomat in Cuba, James Cason. They were sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment on charges of collaborating with, or taking money from, US officials.
Amnesty International condemned the executions, which were the first for a terrorism offence in Cuba in more than a decade, and reversed significant human rights progress made over a period of years. It said: “The men were given a summary trial, and their appeals to the supreme court and the Council of State were dealt with in a cursory and wholly inadequate manner. They were shot and killed less than a week after their trial began.”
Severe retribution against opponents is more easily justified in the heat of combat or in a revolutionary armed struggle, such as the guerrilla war waged by Fidel Castro’s ‘26th July Movement’ against the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista which was overthrown in 1959. It might also be justified in the early days of regime change, before legal authority has been established and consolidated (one of the grounds used by its supporters to justify the fledgling Free State’s executions of republican prisoners in the civil war).
Having said that, I remember being disturbed when I read John Lee Anderson’s biography of Che Guevara in 1997, on the thirtieth anniversary of his execution in Bolivia at the hands of the CIA. In that book I learnt that Guevara had been in charge of dealing with supporters of the defeated regime and army in huge show trials and suppressing all dissidents, including those belonging to the 26th July Movement who did not approve of communism. He carried out 500 executions in the first four months of 1959. Even close members of his family and old friends who came to visit him were shocked at his mercilessness.
“In this thing,” he said. “Either you kill first or else you get killed.”
Last week Cuba’s Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said the recent executions were intended to dissuade other would-be hijackers and nip in the bud an ensuing exodus across the Straits of Florida that would create a confrontation with the US government and end in war. He said, “We were obliged by the circumstances under which the country is living, and with pain, to carry out the executions, as a last resort.”
This was a reference to the hostile attitude of the US government to Cuba since the revolution, and the nervousness abroad, among several sovereign nations, that since the collapse of the USSR, and particularly since Afghanistan and Iraq, there are no constraints on the aggression of the US and its mission of imposing a new world order.
After the 1959 revolution 200,000 Cubans, many from the wealthy, governing-class, fled the island and settled in Miami. The US broke off relations and using the exiles launched ceaseless covert operations, including several assassination attempts against Castro, terrorist acts which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocent Cuban civilians and sabotage of Cuban factories. The Kennedy administration launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, which ended in humiliation for the Americans. It was the threat of a second invasion that influenced Castro to accept Soviet missiles as a nuclear defence – the build-up that led to the missile crisis of October 1962 and which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
For forty-three years now the US has punished this island of 11 million people with an embargo on trade that has cost Cuba as much as US$60 billion. The cost of importing goods from distant countries and the inability to trade with the US has caused great damage to the Cuban economy which has now come to rely heavily on tourism.
The Bush administration is threatening further punitive measures including suspending family remittances (those crucial US dollars that many Cuban Americans send home to their relatives) and grounding direct flights between both countries. The US encourages illegal migration by granting automatic residence to Cubans (and automatic bail to hijackers) who make it to US soil, the only nationality to enjoy such treatment.
Solidarity groups point to the fact that were it not for the US embargo Cuba would have evolved democratically decades ago and that it is hypocritical of the USA to complain about the death penalty given its record of executing minors and the clinically insane and the fact that it holds more than 600 people, some of them children, in unlawful detention at Guantanamo Bay, in part of US-occupied Cuba.
They argue that Cuba is under siege and has the right to curtail some civil rights and liberties in order to defend the successes of the revolution, its advances in medicine, free health care, social services and education, for example. A few years ago Nelson Mandela thanked the Cuban people: “Not only did they support us in rhetoric, they gave us the resources to conduct the struggle and win.” He went on to describe Cuba’s achievements as an inspiration. “They convey a message to the developing world that ignorance and disease are not unalterable conditions of human life”, and he thanked President Castro for sending teachers, builders and doctors to Africa and for training many South Africans in his schools and universities.
Two years ago Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams visited Havana and in a state ceremony thanked the Cuban people for their solidarity and recognition of the ten republican hunger strikers in 1981.
Unfortunately, the powerful dictate to the rest of the world. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank control development and growth, impose strict conditions on trade, taxes and public spending which attempt to shape political systems in one cultural image. The USA holds up social democracy (which in its case isn’t far removed from a plutocracy maintained through public relations) as the paradigm for other nations, yet its behaviour abroad is arrogant and has led to great suffering and domestically it does not look after its poor or infirm.
In such a constrained world can socialism – the state of Cuba – only exist through a dictatorship, however populist? Fidel Castro, who is now seventy-six, has been in power for forty-four years: we used to condemn the unionists for fifty years of uninterrupted rule at Stormont. Even Nelson Mandela stood down from the presidency of South Africa after one term. The introduction of pluralism would, of course, be exploited by the USA to fund political parties sympathetic to capitalism. Health and housing would quickly be privatised and before long children would be free – free to be picking through rubbish tips for scraps of food instead of picking subjects for their third-level education.
How do we measure justice and the quality of life? Jose Saramago, the Noble Prize-winning Portuguese writer, a communist and a personal friend of Fidel Castrol, bitterly criticised the executions. “Cuba has won no heroic victory by executing these three men, but it has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, robbed me of my illusions.”
It is no bad thing to be robbed off one’s illusions - but to live and participate in the world they still have be replaced with a vision of sorts.
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© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison