May 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Cuba Duele

Eduardo Galeano is the Uruguayan author of Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (Monthly Review Press, 1974). This article is from La Jornada (www.jornada.unam.mx) and was translated informally and posted to the Portside News listserv (portside@yahoogroups.com).

The prison sentences and executions in Cuba are very good news for the universal superpower, which is eager to take out from its throat this irritating bone. They are very bad news, very sad news, news that hurts for those of us that believe in the admirable courage of this very small country, capable of such greatness, but we also believe that freedom and justice march together or not at all.

This is a time for very bad news: as with the terrible impunity of the butchery in Iraq, the Cuban government perpetrates these actions that, as Mr. Carlos Quijano would say, are sins against hope.

Rosa Luxemburg, who gave her life for socialist revolution, disagreed with Lenin in the project for a new society. She wrote prophetic words about what she didn't want. Although she was assassinated in Germany 85 years ago, her words still resonate: Freedom only for those who approve of the Government, only for Party members, no matter how numerous they are, is not freedom. Freedom is always for those who think different from us. She also said: Without open elections, without freedom of the press, unencumbered freedom of assembly, without an open struggle between free opinions, life vegetates and all public institutions will wither, with the bureaucracy surviving as the only active element.

The 20th and the 21st century have been witness to a double betrayal of socialism: the capitulation of social democracy, which reached its peak under Sergeant Tony Blair, and the disaster of the Communist states turned into police states. Many of these states have crumbled, without mourning, and their bureaucrats now serve their new master with pathetic enthusiasm.

The Cuban Revolution was born to be different. Under constant imperial attack, it survived the way it could, not the way it wanted to. Its courageous and generous people sacrificed much in order to stay standing in a world of kneelers. But on the hard road it traveled throughout all these years, the Revolution has been losing the wind of spontaneity and freshness that it blew at its beginning. I say this with pain. Cuba hurts.

A guilty conscience does not prevent me from repeating what I have said, on and off of the Island: I don't believe, and I have never believed in a one-party democracy (not even in the United States, where they have one party disguised as two), nor do I believe that the supremacy of the State is an alternative to the supremacy of the Market.

Those long prison sentences turn these groups that openly operated from the house of James Cason (Bush's representative in Havana) into martyrs of freedom of expression. Acting as if these groups were a real danger, the Cuban authorities have exalted them and have rewarded them with the prestige that words have when they are prohibited.

This "democratic opposition" has nothing to do with the genuine expectations of the Cuban people. If the Revolution had not done them the favor of repressing them, and if Cuba had a real freedom of the press and expression, this so-called dissidence would disqualify itself. And it would receive its deserved punishment, the punishment of isolation, for its noted nostalgia for the colonial times in a country that has chosen the path of national dignity.

The United States, that untiring factory of dictatorships around the world, does not have the moral authority to give lessons in democracy to anyone. Yes, it could give lessons on the death penalty from President Bush, who as governor of Texas, proclaimed himself the champion of state murder by signing 152 death warrants.

But do real Revolutions, those that come from below and from inside like the Cuban Revolution, need to learn the bad habits for the enemy they are fighting? There is no justification for the death penalty, no matter were it is being applied.

Will Cuba be the next prey of Bush's country hunt? His brother Jeb, the Governor of Florida, announced it when he said "we have to look inside our neighborhood," while the exiled Zoe Valdes begged loudly on Spanish TV, "Bomb the Dictator." The Defense Minister (or, better, the Attack Minister) Donald Rumsfeld, explained "not for now."

It looks like the danger meter and the guilt meter, the little machines that choose the next victims of the universal target shoot, point towards Syria. Who knows. Like Rumsfeld says: not for now.

I believe in a people's sacred right of self-determination, any time and any place. I can say this without any qualms in my conscience, because I said it publicly every time this right was violated in the name of socialism, with applause from a large left sector when, for example, the Soviet tanks entered Prague in 1968, or when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

The signs of the decay of a model of centralized power are showing in Cuba, turning into revolutionary merit obedience to orders and to "guidance" from the summit.

The blockade, and the other thousand forms of aggression, block the development of a Cuban democracy, feed the militarization of power, and bring about bureaucratic rigidity. Recent events show that it is more difficult than ever to open a citadel that has been closing in order to defend itself. But these events also show that a democratic opening is, now more than ever, imperative.

It will be the Cuban people, and only the Cuban people, without any outside hands interfering, who will open the new democratic spaces and win the liberties they lack, inside the Revolution that they made, rooted in Cuban earth.

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