Cuba Coverage
I was very impressed with your
report on Cuba [Sept/Oct, 1995].
It was broad and comprehensive,
giving the reader a good sense of
the difficult reality facing Cuba
today. I also liked the fact that you
included viewpoints from a pro-
gressive perspective that are
opposed to the Castro government.
Many Cubans support the revolu-
tion but they do not support
Castro’s autocracy-which is not a
contradiction.
I would also like to comment on
Marifeli P6rez-Stable’s assessment
of the Cuban Committee for
Democracy (CCD) in her essay on
the meaning of Cuba. She suggests
that it is an organization of moder-
ates, and it is true that many of its
members are indeed moderates.
However, as a member who con-
siders himself a progressive, I
believe that P6rez-Stable’s defini-
tion of “moderate” is based on how
Cuban politics is perceived by
those on the outside. Cubans are
either viewed as followers of Jorge
Mas Canosa or naive believers who
always have an excuse for Castro’s
wrongdoings. As a U.S.-based
coalition that brings together dif-
ferent viewpoints and seeks to
establish a middle ground, I
believe that the CCD represents the
vast majority of Cuban Americans.
I hope your next effort will
include the voices of dissidents that
are fighting for democracy in Cuba
like Yndimiro Restano. You will be
surprised by how progressive some
of these people are.
Lorenzo Canizares
Trenton, New Jersey
W hat a thrill it was to pick up
your Sept/Oct 1995 issue and
read the fine coverage of Cuba. I
recently visited Cuba, and one
thing everyone seems to agree
about is that times are very hard.
But the Cuban people with whom I
spoke seemed to be up to the chal-
lenge and wanted to hold out
against U.S. meddling in Cuban
affairs. To me the answer for this
country is simple: let the Cubans in
Cuba decide what path their brand
of socialism will take. It’s a mes-
sage that ought to be understood in
Miami-as well as in Washington.
Jay Marvin
WLS Radio
Chicago, Illinois
In NACLA’s report on Cuba, the
editors’ introduction to the testi-
monies from Cuba and Mexican
cartoonist Rius’ essay on the mean-
ing of Cuba both cite Castro’s
famous pronouncement, “Inside
the revolution, everything; against
the revolution, nothing,” as short-
hand for the Cuban revolution’s
cultural policy. I am not sure if it is
possible to analyze the present
conjuncture using this phrase.
Castro said it in a congress of
Cuban and foreign intellectuals on
June 30, 1961 in a context that was
radically different from the pre-
sent. Let’s remember that in
January, 1961, the United States
had severed diplomatic relations
with Cuba, and in April of the same
year, it had launched the Bay of
Pigs invasion. Those weren’t days
of mere ideological confrontation;
they were days of war.
To use the phrase to condemn the
current Cuban media, as Rius does
in his essay, is like saying that
Russian journalism is bad because
Lenin said that the role of the media
is “to inform, to educate and to
Erratum
The picture of day laborers in West Los
Angeles on page 21 of the previous issue
should have been credited to Tom
McKitterick / Impact Visuals.
organize,” in his book, What is to be
Done, which he wrote during an all-
out revolutionary war. If the idea is
to criticize the Cuban media objec-
tively and constructively, we would
do ourselves a big favor if we used
other arguments (of which there are
many and very good ones).
Moreover, in June of 1961, it was
easy to say who and what was the
Cuban revolution: it was the beard-
ed rebeldes, the anonymous heroes
of the Bay of Pigs, the men and
women who went to the mountains
to teach peasants how to read and
write as part of the national literacy
campaign, those who volunteered
to cut sugar cane in the fields. On
the other side were those who burnt
down the cane plantations, those
who attacked peasants and killed
their livestock, those who put
bombs in the movie theaters, those
who launched surprise attacks on
the beaches and machine-gunned
sunbathers, those who invaded the
country at the Bay of Pigs. Cuban
reality today is much more com-
plex than in 1961. Where do we
draw the line for and against these
days?
It’s clear that socialism (from an
ideological point of view) has suf-
fered changes in Cuba. It’s not
clear if we are dealing with a struc-
tural crisis or if-to make refer-
ence to an old axiom of material-
ism, the dialectic-we are dealing
with a transition towards another
form of social organization, anoth-
er idea of socialism. Everything
points to the fact that socialism as
an ideological bloc will not be the
same in Cuba after the present con-
juncture. What is interesting is not
to dissect the cadaver, but to study
under what conditions it can be
revived.
Aldo Gamboa
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
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