Castro's Cuba
If the average Latin American peasant went to his bed one night and somehow woke up in Cuba the next morning, he would think he had died and gone to heaven.
That's more or less how journalist Alexander Cockburn put it many years ago – though I don't have the original quote in front of me and am sure he formulated the idea more elegantly than that. While parts of Latin American have improved in the past couple of years, the image still conveys the material benefits that Cuba's revolution has delivered, compared to, say, the monetarism and neo-liberalism (and war and near-genocidal levels of violence) that others in the region have "enjoyed" in the meantime.
It was and remains an outrageous idea in the US media. Indeed, if the average Washington journo-ideologue went to his bed one night and somehow woke up in Ireland the next morning, to read the Irish Times and hear RTÉ talking about Fidel Castro, he would think he had died and gone to hell.
Of course Irish people have the advantage of being able to go to Cuba, one many have seized. Thus when American Mary Ellen Synon finds herself in hell, spluttering in disbelief at a vaguely sympathetic Irish Times editorial, saying Castro has "impoverished and imprisoned" his people, many readers can confidently refer to their own first-hand knowledge to the contrary.
Enough what-aboutery
Touristic experience is not your best guide to a country's reality, but tourists could tell Cuba was in decline a few years ago, and has lately been revived, in confidence and prosperity, by forces as diverse as Hugo Chavez and Ry Cooder. This apparently accurate and largely positive assessment is quite separate from the one mostly missing even in sympathetic Irish media, a recognition of Cuba's small but real role since the '60s in fighting colonialism and neo-colonialism globally.
As for imprisonment, Irish people who haven't been to Cuba but also haven't been immersed in Fox News are quick to observe, a la Irish Times cartoonist Martyn Turner, that the US is probably holding more prisoners in its frankly illegal Cuban cages at Guantanamo Bay than Castro is holding "political prisoners" elsewhere on the island.
Eoghan Harris in the Sunday Independent criticises Finian McGrath TD for skeptically rebuffing a Magill question about Castro's "torture chambers". But there is no evidence of systematic torture in Cuba today, so McGrath was essentially correct.
Still, even an ex-Stalinist such as Harris has a point when he casts doubt on sentimental "Fidelism". I know a hardened Dublin hack whose eyes fill up recalling a Cuban child getting a birthday cake "from Fidel". We should be mature enough to reject such populist demagoguery, and the real repression that exists in Fidel's/Raul's Cuba.
An Eoghan goal
No, Harris doesn't have much of a point – not when his slap at Castro comes just after he urges us to disdain "moral innocence" and accept that Israel's gotta do what it's gotta do against "ideological Islam". Given the battering the US has given Cuba over the last 45 years (invasion, embargo, subversion, etc) the Harris algebra (not mine) suggests Cuba should get some licence to repress, especially since its exercise of it stops well short of dropping bombs on civilians.
Harris finishes his discourse on Cuba by observing confidently – how else? – that Cuba's social gains, its "alleged free medical and educational facilities... will be found to be propaganda frauds".
Well, I suppose that could be "found" by someone, just as it is "found" by Harris that the Shannon Five were acquitted, "astoundingly", on the basis of their "moral innocence", their "purist private beliefs", adding: "Behind the jury's decision was the delusion that we can conduct a state on the basis of Christian ethics."
Harris wasn't in the jury room any more than I was, though if I had been a juror in that trial I'd feel tempted to invite Harris and others into court for their dumb, defamatory slurs. "It's like giving a licence to lunatics," he writes. "Can I now kill a cop in the course of my anti-American activities and claim my conscience compelled me to do it?"
Claim what you like, Harris ? and good luck with your anti- American activities ? but you'll definitely be unable to employ what the Shannon Five's lawyers did, the specific statutory defence under the Criminal Damage Act, for killing a garda. Still, why let legal reality get in the way of a good rant, or even a rotten one?